Building off of our first Local Search AMA back in April, Mike Blumenthal hosted Joy Hawkins, Krystal Taing and myself to share local SEO tips, Google My Business changes, digital marketing strategies and more.
Full Webinar Video
Each speaker shared their top 3 tips right now for your local digital marketing strategies and we’ll feature a few of those below the video in this post. Dozens of questions related to Google, Google My Business, review gating, and more were answered in the hour long webinar.
Google My Business Changes
You can’t spend an hour on local SEO and not cover Google My Business (GMB). 2020 and COVID-19 have brought about a lot of new GMB features and changes to existing ones.
Krystal Taing of Rio SEO highlighted two GMB related items to the discussion covering the “More hours” feature and the new and updated attributes.
More hours allows a business to select the hours for specific services it offers such as delivery, takeout, drive through, and pickup. Certain More hours can only be set for specific business types, so explore what is available to you and how to leverage this.
Krystal also touched on new and updated attributes for GMB. These attributes display in the GMB profile and the 3-pack and help searchers take note of special services offered by the business. Many of the recent additions and changes center around COVID-19 and the expansion of service or purchase models businesses have switched too. Most recently Google has added call-outs for online care, online appointments, online classes, and online estimates.
Google’s Spam Problem
You can’t have Joy “the hawk” Hawkins on and not mention spam. One of Joy’s points focused on the always and current spam problem Google has with GMB listings. The example she hit on was shared by SEO Lily Ray in a series of tweets regarding fake listings in the rehab space.
Joy’s example showed how many fake listings accompany just one legitimate listing in the results for a search that could bring someone medical harm. Spam like this at Google can hurt a lot more than leads and marketers.
Reviews Gain “Content With A Click”
Google loves their attributes and recently has been releasing review attributes in many service categories. What started last year in home services categories has now expanded into most service type business categories.
Review attributes allow the consumer to add content and context to their review with just a click. Depending on the rating Google surfaces positive or critical attributes the reviewer can select. I see this as a really big change for Google reviews, so much so that we immediately worked to launch a new feature to monitor Google attributes.
Social Media Storytelling
A great way to draw attention to your business with some humor, facts, and visuals might be using storytelling. I was reminded of this by my local golf course that spent a few weeks giving a shot by shot tour of each hole on the golf course. The posts were well crafted, creative, emoji-filled and drew attention without working too hard to sell.
As I mentioned in the webinar, any business type can find a story to tell. The example I used was a plumber could take a picture of each of their tools and then tell the story of the tools nickname, common uses, worst job it was used on, etc. There really is no limit if you want to be creative and take a different angle, an angle that social media is perfect for.
The Only Thing Constant In Local SEO Is Change
As our second AMA shows it’s not hard to have a lot of new information every two months in local search. Google My Business updates, SEO strategies, and digital marketing tactics are always evolving. I hope you enjoyed this one and stay tuned for our next one in August.
