Just over a month ago, Google announced that it would be making some important changes to Google My Business, the platform that recently further asserted its dominance over other local pack ranking factors in Whitespark’s annual Local Ranking Factors survey.

These changes included retiring the Google My Business name in favor of “Google Business Profile,” improving the functionality of the “direct edit” experience (in which a business owner can manage their profile directly from the search results), and retiring the Google My Business mobile app in 2022.

Google My Business’s place at the heart of any local businesses’ online marketing and visibility efforts means that any significant changes cannot be ignored. Tie those updates in with a name change — something that usually generates a lot of fanfare and speculation, whatever the industry — and it’s easy to see why some (including myself) saw this as an emergence of a new era for local SEO and businesses on Google.

But is it?

After the dust had settled on the announcement, I wanted to hear how industry experts view the changes and whether they’d be doing anything differently. I also wanted to know what the average local search marketer made of these changes. Would it make any difference to their day-to-day?

Let’s look at the announced changes, one by one, and see what the people have to say.

Google My Business is now Google Business Profile

As a content marketer by profession, my interest was naturally piqued most by the announcement of a name change. But in reality, what does this really mean beyond my fellow content marketers having to sigh and make plans to change/update content in reaction?

First, what has actually changed? Well, before the change, the platform to access the dashboard of your Business Profile was called “Google My Business,” but the actual output — the profile users see in the Knowledge Panel and that appears in Local Pack and Google Maps search results — was commonly called Business Profile anyway.

You can think of it as the thing you “did” being Google My Business, but the thing that actually changed was your “Business Profile.” Google has clearly acknowledged the confusion here and decided to put everything under the umbrella of Google Business Profile with the old GMB dashboard renamed to “Google Business Profile Manager.”

Experts agree that the retiring of the name “Google My Business” matters very little, and, if anything, it’s going to make the discipline of local SEO and profile optimization far easier for agencies and consultants to explain to their local business clients.

Andrew Shotland, of Local SEO Guide, told me: “This kind of reminds me of when they switched from Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console. While it caused a brief dust-up on SEO Twitter, ultimately I don’t think it impacted anyone other than the teams at Google working on these services.”

“In other words, while the GBP name provides a bit more clarity about what the product is, for current users I don’t think this matters,” he added, “I guess for businesses that this is all new to, it might help them better understand what in fact this service is. So I would expect this will improve uptake of the service from SMBs, which I would expect is Google’s goal.”

That note about making the service more appealing to SMBs is an interesting one, and one that we’ll come back to.

Meanwhile, DealerOn’s Greg Gifford sees complaints about rebranding as ultimately unfounded. “Everyone’s complaining that Google keeps rebranding, but it’s been seven years since the last name change. And now everyone’s making the same complaints they made seven years ago. In reality, Local SEOs are the only ones complaining; for the run-of-the-mill business owner, it’s a complete non-issue,” he says.

Still, I can’t help but feel for my team of content specialists weaving their way through years’ worth of GMB content and working out what, and how much, to change. My sympathies are with you if you’re in a similar boat.

As Joy Hawkins, of Sterling Sky, puts it: “It’s really only annoying for us to have to go back and update the dozens of blogs on our site that reference ‘Google My Business.’”

A veteran of local SEO, Joy had the foresight to stop playing Google’s game a long time ago, though. She says, “Google constantly does this, though, so when we renamed our Facebook group, we decided to go with Local Search Insiders instead of having to rename our group every four years when Google decides to rebrand again.”

To ensure I captured a range of opinions on these changes, we polled BrightLocal users to learn what they thought would impact their work, if anything. When it came to the name change, just 12% thought it would have any impact on their business, with 4% of agency respondents and 3% of consultants believing the name change would have some impact on their business.

If you’re all set to jump into your content and swap every mention of Google My Business out, my advice is not to do it, and instead to balance mentions of GMB with new mentions of GBP. If the Google Trends data after the last name change are anything to go by, people will still be searching for “google my business” for years to come.

Google My Business mobile app to be retired in 2022

Sticking with things being retired, one of the bigger updates mentioned in the original announcement was that the Google My Business dedicated mobile app would be deprecated some time in 2022.

Depending on whether you’re a local business owner in love with easy access to GMB Messaging or a local SEO agency frustrated by the limited access granted to managers by the app, you may be welcoming or fearing this change.

Joy Hawkins says that this update is “the only thing I really think is changing” within these announcements, and that “if anyone had got used to using that, they might have an adjustment to make.” Steady Demand’s Ben Fisher, who is also a Diamond Product Expert for GBP, admits that “the usage is not very high, according to Google.”

The low uptake of this app is something Andrew Shotland reflects on, too, saying “It likely had very low usage, and was expensive to maintain. Given how the rest of the world has gone app-y, that’s the only reason I can come up with for retiring an app these days. I can tell you I used it once or twice on our business and then never again.”

Given that the key market for the app was SMBs wanting to manage their business on the go, it seems a surprise that Google would remove this if their focus is indeed on attracting that audience. However, there’s been a much more exciting, and easy-to-access, profile management experience waiting in the wings for its time to shine: the ability to update and manage your Business Profile right there in the SERP.

The ‘direct edit’ Business Profile management experience

In its announcements, Google mentioned more functionality being added to the “in-search” merchant experience, saying that “the easiest way to manage your profile is now via Google Maps and Search. Moving forward, additional tools to help you understand how your business is performing and how you can enhance your online presence will be available exclusively on Search and Maps.”

This experience has been around for over a year now: just log into your Google Account, search for your business name (or even just “my business” if you want to pick from all the accounts you manage) and there it is.

What’s new is the functionality coming over from the old Google My Business dashboard that aims to make this approach to management more appealing to account owners. One big update is that businesses can now claim, verify and even resolve suspension of Business Profiles without needing a separate dashboard.

To the best of my knowledge, the ability to manage a profile in Search doesn’t have an official, Google-verified name, but I’ve seen it called “direct edit,” “in-search experience” and “the NMX, or New Merchant Experience.”

(Side note: back in 2020, Ben Fisher said that Google felt that “X” was cooler than “E.” While I agree, I’d like to think it was also to avoid confusion with the British music newspaper, the NME. As a Brit myself, how I wish they’d considered this with the focus on Google Business Profile, or GBP, more commonly known “round our gaff” as the Great British Pound… sigh.)

So, what should we make of Google’s direction here? Mike Blumenthal, of Near Media and GatherUp, says that “by creating and emphasizing a new small business experience via search, Google can also hopefully increase awareness of Google Local amongst very small businesses.”

Greg Gifford agrees, saying that “it’s more helpful to businesses who don’t have a marketing person/agency in place, since they can now make their edits directly in the SERPs.”

However, while it might be easier, are small businesses missing out on functionality still only available in the Google Business Profile Manager (GBPM — aka the old GMB dashboard)? 

It’s certainly true that the direct edit experience isn’t a like-for-like with the Google Business Profile Manager. For example, while you can set up Google Posts in the direct edit experience, you can’t manage your Google Products and Services, which still have to be edited and set up via the Business Profile Manager.

Mike Blumenthal is interested to see how direct edit can achieve this without overcomplicating things, saying: “What isn’t as clear is if the new(ish) search interface can provide a good small business user experience for adding the many details and turning on and managing the many features available in Google Local without becoming a nightmare.”

Kick Point’s Elizabeth Linder agrees, and says: “What you can manage directly in Search and Maps compared to in the dashboard still feels a bit muddled.” She also notes that “being prompted to make changes directly from Search and Maps may result in confusion, or worse, in business owners making changes haphazardly.”

Giving more visible power to clients to potentially mess up your properly-researched and fully-considered profile optimization strategy is certainly a concern for agencies, but Elizabeth sees the other side of the coin, too, and believes that “it’s an opportunity for business owners to look more closely at their branded SERP and learn a little more about what us agencies mean when we’re referring to their business profile”.

But is everything a new merchant needs to do really that visible in SERPs? While Ben Fisher points out that “most merchants go to search for their business name and then submit edits” and that “the web-based version of GBP is something that was born out of Google really watching how merchants behaved,” Andrew Shotland feels that more could be done to bring the ability to claim a profile to the attention of business owners in the first place, saying: “They need to do a better job of [informing] the manager of the profile that you can do this.”

“Right now, I just see that tiny ‘own this business?’ link, which is fine, but they need something like that big honking Search Console widget so business owners will notice it,” he adds.

For what it’s worth, Google is now promoting the ability to edit your profile in SERPs and Maps from within the Google Business Profile Manager:

Thinking of businesses further afield, Online Ownership’s Tim Capper notes that there are currently significant downsides to the focus on the direct edit experience, notably that “they have not managed to integrate editing of the Business Profile-created websites (business.site), which is pretty big considering that there are around forty million small businesses in Asia and Africa that rely on these for their businesses.”

So, with Google bringing more and more functionality to the direct edit experience, where does that leave the future of the Google Business Profile Manager?

The answer, it seems, is that the future’s (hopefully) bright.

Google Business Profile Manager: more than a name change?

So far, these updates have been fairly well communicated by Google, but one aspect of the announcement had agency owners reading between the lines. Regarding the GMB dashboard, which thousands of agencies use every day to manage multiple client profiles, Google had this to say:

“The Google My Business website will transition to support primarily larger businesses with multiple profiles and will be renamed ‘Business Profile Manager’. Larger businesses will still be able to manage individual profiles on Search and Maps if they choose to do so. Over time we expect smaller businesses to shift to managing individual profiles directly on Search and Maps.”

I feel we can be forgiven for thinking that the lack of language around those managing multiple different businesses, and the focus instead on “larger businesses,” left agencies and single businesses out in the cold. When my company wrote about these changes at the time, the number one question we received was around this (and it was the loudest-shouted question internally, too): “What about agencies and single businesses? Will they still be able to manage multiple individual GBP profiles in the dashboard?”

Luckily, Ben Fisher is here to set the record straight: “There seems to be a ton of confusion after the messaging from Google about this update. Let me make this super-clear for everyone… the Google Business Profile Manager (formerly GMB Web) is NOT going anywhere, and more importantly, I must stress it STILL, and WILL STILL BE available to single-listing merchants. Okay, if all caps are not enough to convince you, I have this on high from Google themselves (although nothing is publicly stated yet).”

“This all makes sense if you take a step back. Google is a software company, they make decisions on where to spend time and resources based on big data sets. While this is not perfect, it does inform what moves they should make,” he adds.

Ben also told us, back when the news was announced, that “agencies can still manage in bulk and via the API; nothing has changed there.”

So if you’re an agency working with clients, you’ll still be able to use the Google Business Profile Manager to manage them, as you always have been. While the GBPM is not exclusive to multi-location businesses managing lots of profiles for one business, it does seem that, with single-business functionality focused elsewhere, this leaves more room for Google to make improvements for those managing local SEO at scale.

On this, Mike Blumenthal is optimistic: “I am largely hopeful that this ‘split’ of the local small business UI away from the Dashboard will allow Google to focus their efforts to improve the experience and get rid of the significant bugs present for multi-location businesses in the GBP dashboard. 

“If Google is true to their word, this will allow them to increase multi-location and agency functionality via the dashboard. The dashboard currently has so many bugs and weird artifacts that it is a huge burden to manage businesses at scale in the environment. Things like rejecting automatic updates or even downloading a complete list of businesses or getting accurate Insights are not possible, or work extremely poorly at scale. 

“If you are a pessimist, you see the long neglect of the Dashboard and the increased focus on the web interface as an indication that Google is getting ready to nuke the Dashboard. I, being the eternal optimist, am taking Google at their word and think that the Dashboard will be fixed and once again become useful.”

Andrew Shotland is also on the hopeful side, saying: “I hope this means they will invest more in supporting [multi-locations] and providing a richer feature set. My guess is the multi-location businesses are the biggest users of the dashboards, even though their numbers may be dwarfed by the number of SMBs around the world.”

What do others think?

We’ve heard from a handful of experts, and I’ve provided some of my thoughts, but what about the legions of SEOs and small business owners with their boots firmly on the ground and their noses to the grindstone?

Does being so close to the individual day-to-day of SEO mean that they’re less aware of, or careless about, the grand movements of the unknowable machine that is Google? From our research, it certainly seems so.

Our poll not only showed that a third of respondents didn’t know anything about them, but also that only 10% of local businesses felt the changes would impact them. However, only 13% of agencies, consultants and freelancers felt “positive” or “very positive” about the changes.

The picture this paints is that these changes are, as the experts I spoke to broadly agreed, not nearly as substantial as initially supposed.

What they do, though, is signal a direction that Google may be heading in, attracting small businesses to its platform through profile edit visibility and potentially providing a better place for multi-location brands to manage their profiles at scale.

All this leaves me in a reflective mood, considering how quickly we in the local SEO sphere (particularly the news and content area) are wont to jump at the signs of Google making changes, but ultimately we are Chun-li and Google is M. Bison in this famous scene from the comically bad Street Fighter movie:

“For you, the day Google graced your news feeds with a name change was the most important day in your life.

“For us, it was Thursday.”

Thank you to all the local search experts who talked to me for this story, and to the BrightLocal users who responded to our poll.

The post Seismic event or overblown rebrand: Local search experts weigh in on ‘death’ of Google My Business appeared first on Search Engine Land.

A new experiments workflow is rolling out to select Google Ads accounts, according to reports from numerous PPC professionals. Tip of the hat to Dario from the Marketing O’Clock Discord channel for first spotting this update. Google declined to provide a specific date for when this feature will roll out more widely.

Why we care. Marketers that often use experiments to identify ways to optimize their campaigns may feel that it is “super annoying” to have to create a draft first. This new workflow eliminates that step, making the process less clunky, which can save advertisers time.

Likewise, being able to sync changes from the base campaign and receiving customized reporting based on experiment goals can also be a timesaver and make Google Ads experiments that much more useful for advertisers.

The new Google Ads experiments page. Advertisers that have access to the new experiments page may see the following notice: “The new experiments page allows you to create experiment campaigns without creating a draft, automatically sync changes from your base campaign to your trial campaign, and receive customized reporting based on experiment goals.” Tip of the hat to Brett Bodofsky for sharing the notice on Twitter.

Below are screen captures of the new workflow, courtesy of Greg Finn from Cypress North.

The left-hand navigation has been updated from “Drafts & experiments” to just “Experiments” to reflect the change. 

There are three options: Optimize text ads, video experiment and custom experiment.

Not just for advertisers in the U.S. Michele Senatore, a digital marketer based in Italy, also spotted the update. Google has not stated whether this update will roll out globally.

What Google said. “We do a lot of experiments and we’re always testing to find new ways to improve the experience for our advertisers, but we don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land when asked about the new experiments workflow.

The post Google Ads ditches campaign drafts in updated experiments page appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Content has become the primary tool we use to create a dialogue with our prospects and cultivate online customer relationships. That content must be relevant, valuable and interactive to win their attention and draw them into a conversation. In reality, content has always been the best way to do marketing.

But with the overabundance of information overloading your customers and prospects, it becomes difficult for them to find a trustworthy source of information. The solution is more than positioning your brand as the expert in your niche by creating content and reaping the rewards. It is optimizing your content for organic, paid traffic and site search that converts.

By exploring the relationship between SEO, SEM and on-site search, you can begin to optimize the experience your prospects get when they arrive at your site. 

Learn more by watching Coveo’s Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Rahal’s informative SMX Next session for tips and tricks on creating an onsite search strategy that helps you better understand each visit and optimize every interaction.

After this session, you’ll be able to educate your teams about the value of onsite search and why you need to invest now; benchmark your site search and learn what capabilities are key to boosting conversion; rethink how you design navigation and map user journeys with artificial intelligence and start unifying your search and web analytics data to understand customer intent better.

Ensure that every visitor you get through organic and paid search finds what they’re looking for. Sign up here to learn more about on-site search.

The post Why on-site search is the best investment you’ll make in 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of addressing the SERP title change made to one of our most important MarTech pages. In Part 3, we discussed the tactics we used to fix broken images, find the correct replacements and, ultimately, improve user experience.

RELATED: Navigating Google’s title changes: The rollout, what’s happening now and what you can do about it

Analyzing the Google SERP title tag changes

Ever since Google announced changes to its SERP page title generation process, SEOs have been scrambling to measure its impact, adjusting their strategies when necessary. Many organizations saw minor changes to their site’s title tags, but there were some notable exceptions. Our team, in particular, noticed a major edit to our MarTech mission page title link (the title of a search result in Google Search).

The SERP title was changed to “MarTech is Marketing Logo,” (shown above) which is pulled from our MarTech site’s header logo alt text. Whereas the original title link (shown below) was our chosen title (“What is MarTech? …This is MarTech”), Google opted to display a piece of alt text that gives little context and fails to encourage clicks.

Reviewing the changes in clicks and CTR

Most of the MarTech SERP title changes we’ve seen haven’t changed drastically. As a result, their clicks, impressions and CTR numbers stayed at expected levels over the past few months.

But, we wanted to zoom in on the search metrics for our “What is Martech?” page to see what impact an unwanted title change made by Google has had, especially since it’s one of our most visited pages. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t good.

Knowing the SERP title change took place between October 27 and November 1, we compared the page’s November performance to its October results. We found that the page’s total clicks decreased from 2,301 to 1,500 and the average CTR went from 3.1% to 2%.

The total impressions went from 73,691 to 75,427 and the average position remained 12.7. This implies that the SERP title change hasn’t affected visibility or rankings (as Google said it wouldn’t), but rather heavily discouraged people from clicking on the result.

Clearly, the SERP title change hurt our traffic, so we needed to find a way to address it.

Taking steps to change the SERP title

Waiting for Google to change the title on its own is the last thing we wanted to do. We decided to take action right away. Here are a few of the tactics we’ve tried so far.:

• Resubmit the page. We immediately resubmitted the page to Google via Search Console. While this isn’t likely to change anything, there’s always the chance it helps crawlers pick up on page elements they’ve missed — in this case, our title tag.
• Update the title tag. Since it appears the algorithm had an issue with our chosen tag, we made an adjustment. We were careful not to transform it completely; it is now ”What is MarTech? …MarTech is Marketing.” This version more clearly points to the topic of the page, which we hope Google notices.
• Add contextual internal links. There are already plenty of internal links pointing to this page, but we wanted to be sure Google had plenty of context. So, we added more links with contextual anchor text to the page — keyword phrases such as “what is martech,” “martech is marketing,” or simply “martech” — to show the crawlers what this page is actually about.
• Monitor the SERPs. We’re keeping an eye on our title link to see if these changes helped. We will continue repeating these steps every week or two — as long as it takes.

Have your title links experienced major changes over the past few months? What strategies have you implemented and have any been successful? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line “Messy SEO Part 4” to let me know.

More Messy SEO

Read more about our new MarTech domain’s SEO case study.

• Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migration
• Part 2: The importance of canonicalization
• Part 3: How to find cached images and improve user experience

The post When Google’s title change goes wrong appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google is rolling out a few updates to Google Search to help users find doctors and healthcare providers that are right for them. These updates include being able to see if a doctor or healthcare provider accepts your insurance and if they speak your language.

Health insurance. Google Search can now show you which insurance networks the doctor or healthcare provider might accept. Plus, on the mobile search results, Google will let you filter providers by the insurance plans accepted. This will help users determine if a provider accepts their insurance, including Medicare, private insurance and employer-funded insurance, government-affiliated health programs and more.

Speak my language. Healthcare providers and doctors can also edit their Google Business Profile listing to define the languages spoken at their offices. Google said patients “want to be able to communicate clearly in their language of choice.” Google says there are over a dozen languages represented, including Spanish and American Sign Language.

How to update your details. Google says you can update your healthcare facilities details in your Google Business Profile, so make sure you verify your business with Google. Then you will be able to:

• Add additional insurance providers they accept from a pre-populated list of available insurance providers
• Remove insurance providers and networks that are listed erroneously

Note, the feature will be disabled if all insurance information is removed and for any other insurance related information and issues, providers can submit feedback directly to the Google My Business support team.

Why we care. Finding a healthcare provider or doctor can be intimidating for some, so any way to make it easier to find one is important.

For those of you who have healthcare providers as clients, you will want to make sure the insurance information in the Google search results for your clients is accurate and if not, make sure that the healthcare provider’s website clearly describes which insurance providers are accepted. Also, don’t forget the easiest method is to update the healthcare provider’s Google Business Profile to ensure Google has the latest details on your facility.

The post Google Search lets you see if a doctor or healthcare facility takes your insurance appeared first on Search Engine Land.