Google Provides New Business Display and Connection Choices for the Vacation Push

Google wants to help businesses Make the most of your Google listings for the holidays, with new, streamlined entitlement options for your Google My Business profile and additional insights into how Google search leads people to your business.

First, Google wants to make it easier for businesses to claim and customize their Google listings, with a new option to update and verify your brand profile right from Search and Maps.

As explained by Google:

“Starting this week, you can easily claim and confirm your company profile directly in Google search or in the Google Maps app. Search for your company by name and you will see an option to claim and verify the associated company profile. Once your business has been verified, you can edit your business information, including address, hours of operation, photos, and more. “

What you should absolutely do – yours Google My Business profile is an important digital property that you should claim. It offers several options to influence how your brand appears in Google search results, and even to a certain extent.

That doesn’t mean filling out your details will automatically put you first on similar searches, but more contextual information in your Google Display listings can play an important role in generating more traffic for your business.

Although this is interesting:

“For the future, we recommend small companies to manage their profiles directly in the search or on maps. For the sake of simplicity, “Google My Business” has been renamed “Google Business Profile”. And in 2022 we will discontinue the Google My Business app so that more retailers can benefit from the improved experience in search and maps. The existing Google My Business web interface will be redesigned to primarily support larger companies with multiple locations and will be renamed “Business Profile Manager”. We’ll be sharing more details about these changes in the coming months.”

You should still claim and update your profile now, but it’s interesting to note that for the next year, Google will be shifting the focus of its business tools to better highlight what exactly this element is and how it can be used to maximize its usage by eliminating the Need a separate app.

Also, expect Google to place even more emphasis on this as it expands access, with additional features and tools that are likely to mimic many of Facebook’s business functions. Watch this room.

Google is adding additional options to notify customers from search, while offering new metrics for Incoming customer calls from their company profile on Google.

This could be an additional, valuable indicator that highlights the benefits of your Google listings. Referral access data does not reflect these interactions. While they can only represent a minority of searches, they can be significant and change the way you look at your future promotions.

Google also recommends that trademarks be used for its Pointy POS data link toolwhich is free and available from your Google Company profile in search. This will ensure that your product listings are connected to Google’s display options, while Google has also updated their performance planner tool in Google Ads to get more insight into your strategy.

While many marketing teams continue to focus most on social platforms, in most cases Google remains the main driver of referral traffic.

SEO may not be as sexy as creative promotions, but its effectiveness is probably much more relevant, and these new options offer more ways to maximize your search performance.