Category: Google+ Local

Yesterday on Plus Google Survey announced a new (and free) survey tool to assess visitor satisfaction with your website. From their post: If you are like most business owners, you know how important a healthy online community is to your business’s success. Traditionally, collecting user feedback has been an expensive and time-consuming process, but now you […]

Google has always been a somewhat “agnostic” resource for local results returning the good with the bad. But when combined with a total waste of good time and Twitter it can produce some interesting results. Dan Liebson noted some “unusual” results that Andrew Shotland and I could not resist pursuing to their (ill)logical conclusion. With […]

The new Local Carousel is certainly going to change user behaviors. Exactly how is still to be determined. To some extent whether ads do better or organic does better depends on what users see in any given “industry + geo” search. It also depends on how they respond to the (thinly?) populated knowledge panels or […]

The Knowledge Graph Carousel was first introduced in August of last year. The Local Carousel was introduced formally last week although it had been appearing regularly before that. While there are similarities between the two types of carousel, they do not return quite the same information or display and it might foster some confusion on […]

At the last Local U Advanced we were fortunate to have two Googlers present; Joel Headley of Customer Support and Dan Pritchett, the lead engineer on the new Google Places for Business Dashboard. The environment was very open (with cameras and tweets off) and it was an incredible opportunity to get questions answered about Google Local. […]

As Dave Rodecker pointed out the other day in his comments on the roll-out of the Local Carousel, the ranking algo that Google is using is the same location prominence algo used in the current/old Google Maps. There does not appear to be any blended/organic influences in the results that I have looked at so […]

It would appear that the new Local Carousel will show up to 20 listings if there that many in any given market. But how few will it show? It seems that the answer is five listings. And at five they look weird on the screen. If there are fewer than five available to display then […]

As suspected Google has announced the roll out the Carousel Display for local results “for local dining, nightlife, hotels, and other attractions on desktop”. Here is Jade’s post in the Forums: Today, we’re announcing an interactive “carousel” of results on Google search for local dining, nightlife, hotels, and other attractions on desktop. This launch is […]

Google first rolled out phone support for businesses using the Places Dashboard in early January of this year to deal with verification issues and subsequently announced additional phone support for data quality issues in late January for all English speaking users. They had introduced email support in the US in Oct 2011 and rolled out email […]

Last Thursday at the Advanced Local U, Dan Pritchett, the engineer heading up the Places for Business Dashboard effort and Joel Headley, joined us for the day long discussions. During the day, the arbitrary limits to the maximum number of listings (25) in the dashboard were discussed and bemoaned by the folks at the seminar. […]

Image courtesy of Greg Gifford. Greg Giford of Autorevo and Dr. Pete Meyers of Moz are both reporting increased visibility of the Local Carousel display that highlights local businesses at the top of the SERPS in a highly photographic style rather than the embedded 7-Pack Local Universal display of a list of pins. Interesting for the […]

As the new Google Places for Business Dashboard is being adopted more widely, we are starting to gain insights into its strengths and limits. One of its great strengths (besides a much enhanced interface) is the speed at which data typically makes it to the public listing making the use of MapMaker no longer as […]

Googler Jade W posted in the Google for Business forums that they have now added a link to the branded Knowledge panel result for local businesses that allows business owners to claim their listing directly from the main search result page. The link only shows on a direct branded search not on a category search. […]

Last week Google announced that they were starting the process of converting existing, old style dashboards to the new Google Places for Business Dashboard. I just received this email notice that one of my favorite “business” listings had received the dashboard update: Illusory Laptop Repair. When you log into the new dashboard the user is presented […]

Google has announced in the forum that they have fixed one of the previously noted issues with the new Google Places for Business Dashboard; the speed of photo uploads. In the old Dashboard it might have taken a month or more for photos to show. When the upgraded Dashboard was released last month, it took […]

For as long as Google has displayed local results they have done so with a modified Yellow Page listing approach. With the rollout of the new Google Maps preview, the loss of the Places search link & Places search from the main page of Google and the recent tests of the carousel for local hotel […]

Language is an interesting thing. Sometimes it can be used in terribly inappropriate ways. Like in this email from the US Chamber of Commerce where he suggests “we remember those that have given to the cause ” of supporting “the most… opportunistic country in the world”. Dear Mike , As we celebrate the long weekend […]