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.

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.

Google has updated its reviews help document page in the Google Business Profile support area to say that Google values all reviews, not just positive. Now Google says it is “more trustworthy” to see a mix of both positive and negative reviews on the business profile.

What is new. Google has added a bullet point to the document that reads “Value all reviews: Reviews are useful for potential customers when they’re honest and objective. Customers find a mix of positive and negative reviews more trustworthy. You can always respond to a review to show the customers that you care and provide additional context. If the review doesn’t follow our posting guidelines, you can request to remove it.”

Here is a screenshot:

Ranking impact? This will probably not impact rankings in any way but it might be a sign that if a business has 99% all positive reviews, maybe – just maybe – Google will flag that business and manually audit the reviews of that business. It is simply not natural for all customers to only leave positive reviews on a business online.

Why we care. If you manage local businesses and some of your customers feel anxious about having negative reviews on their business listing, then show them this new update to the Google help document. Maybe that will alleviate some of the anxiety around getting negative reviews?

The post Google says it values all local reviews, both positive and negative appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“COVID itself has changed the way that people interact with businesses online,” said Amanda Jordan, director of local search at LOCOMOTIVE Agency, in her session at SMX Next, “which means that search engines, businesses and marketers had to pivot to meet those demands and needs.”

The events of 2020 have changed how local businesses operate as well as Google’s search results. And, while these shifts are designed to make search easier for consumers, many businesses have been caught unawares, losing visibility on Google.

Local marketers are at the forefront of these SERP updates, helping clients adapt to changes in features such as their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and Google Maps. But, the differences in these updates are not lost on local marketing professionals.

“Google, as always, is changing the layout and testing new things, so that’s not surprising,” said Jordan. “The thing that I found most interesting were the changes to reviews and the knowledge panel.”

To help local SEOs navigate these developments, Jordan provided the following strategies.

Improve the quality of local reviews

“Google has grouped reviews together by topic,” said Jordan. “This is one of those updates that were mentioned in a timeline. You can see that there is a new badge for the new reviews.”

Google also seems to be reorganizing how it displays third-party reviews.

“Third-party reviews are going to continue to be important because those are being shown in the knowledge panel,” said Jordan. “They’re being shown in regular organic search results, so it’s important to know where you stand.”

Review topics, sources, relevancy, and recency each play a major role in how the local algorithm ranks them. Marketers should know where their clients stand in terms of each of these factors and help facilitate the creation of quality reviews.

Edit your knowledge panels using on- and off-site sources

Google is revamping its local knowledge panel in major ways. It seems to be shaping into “its own entity, which includes lots of third-party data,” says Jordan. This means more of your clients’ panel information could be coming from sources you have no access to.

“While these things may seem out of our control, sometimes we can influence what Google uses,” Jordan said.

Here are some areas Jordan recommends marketers check if their panels contain inaccurate data from sources across the web:

On-site sources

• Schema
• Site content
• Robot directives
• Google Business Profile completion

Off-site sources

• Industry sites
• Third-party reviews
• Google reviews

Make corrections to your data sources and test your knowledge panel appearances when possible. Even if the corrections seem small, Google can still find the new information if the changes are made in one of these key areas.

Prepare to adapt to mobile SERP changes

Business information isn’t the only thing changing in this local landscape; mobile SERP layouts are transforming as well. While marketers know this happens, SERPs have begun transforming them frequently — and not always for the better.

Jordan highlighted an instance in which one of her clients’ local panels lost some important information: “We had a client that had their site links not showing up only on mobile only if you search from their city; anywhere else in the world everything was fine.”

Local SERP issues like these can seem complicated to fix, but marketers can use insights from competitor analysis to determine the best course of action. In Jordan’s case, her team worked on updating their client’s local panel so that it would include each element the competitor used.

It should be noted that Google often experiments with local results, which could result in temporary changes to how they display in the SERPs.

Moving forward with local SEO

“Google is going to continue focusing on online reputation and customer sentiment,” Jordan said, pointing to what she believed marketers should expect from local SERPs going forward. Getting clients onboard with these areas of focus can help future-proof their campaigns in the long run.

These changes to local SERPs, coupled with the rise in features focused on purchasing products and booking appointments, will require marketers to become more adaptable. But if Google provides actionable data along the way, businesses can rest assured they’ll be ready for what comes next.

“I would hope that Google’s insights for businesses get even better so that trends and user experience and customer experience show up in your panel,” said Jordan, “So that you’d be able to look at that data and make changes in your business.”

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

The post How marketers can adapt to Google’s local SEO changes appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“Google is using the new Business Profile to solicit small business support for Google’s opposition to pending anti-trust legislation,” wrote Mike Blumenthal, previous founder of LocalU and GatherUp, for Near Media. After the rebrand from Google My Business to Google Business Profile, many business owners received notification of the name change along with prompts to learn more about “new laws [that] may impact my business.”

Google appeals to SMBs to lobby for the tech giant’s case. While we could not replicate the in-SERP dashboard prompt, Blumenthal included screenshots of his Business Profile where Google tells listing managers, “Proposed legislation could make it harder to find your business online.”

On Twitter, Blumenthal also shared an email sent to Darren Shaw of Whitespark, a Canadian local SEO company, prompting them to “take action” on Google’s behalf to advocate for Google’s position to legislators. The idea is that changes to laws will make it hard for Google to offer the same support to small businesses and therefore will hurt SMBs in the long run.

This is not the first time. When in legislative trouble before, Google has previously tried to appeal to users to make its case when laws change. In 2013, they made the case for cookies by telling searchers in the SERP, “Cookies help us deliver our services.” This was a prompt in response to European privacy laws.

When European laws changed to allow people to request removals from the search index, Google emailed individual page owners to tell them, “We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google.”

The same happened when French laws required that Google “remove snippets from their search results for European press publications,” wrote Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. When the EU told Google to stop notifying searchers of removals on individual searches, they followed the request by adding the removal notification to all search pages, said Sam Schechner in the Wall Street Journal:

Google has appeared to bend to regulators’ desire that the company refrain from indicating in search results when something had been removed. Google had earlier indicated it might highlight the removals, something it does when it removes links to pirated content. But EU regulators told Google in recent weeks that such a move would undermine the spirit of the decision by making it clear some individuals had wanted information about them suppressed, one regulator said.

Instead, Google on Thursday added a blanket notification that appears at the bottom of most results for individual name searches conducted on Google’s European search websites, according to an explanation the company posted to its website. The notification – “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe” – is added algorithmically to searches that appear to be for a name, a person familiar with the matter said.

Why we care. Google’s go-to seems to be to appeal to searchers and businesses who use their services when lawsuits affect how they will run their business. “This effort to manipulate small business folks with astroturfing is a whole new level of deception. It lays bare Google’s intentions to protect their monopoly at all costs. Their attempt to buttress arguments with manufactured alliances, for legitimacy, adds fuel to an obvious fire,” wrote Blumenthal in his oped on the matter. If you work with SMBs and they received the notification, there’s a chance they may be worried about how laws and resulting changes will affect their businesses. While marketers are often more skeptical of the search giant’s methods and motives, it may be worth being proactive to your local SEO clients to let them know what this prompt means.

The post Google’s local rebrand prompts SMB support amid antitrust lawsuits, says local SEO expert appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, “What was that one taco place we ordered from last summer?”

Search isn’t just conducted on the world wide web — it occurs in inboxes, order histories, the DMs and more. Search engines are focused on helping us find the new information we’re looking for and, although some degree of personalization impacts the results, it’s very difficult to remember which listing you clicked on if it wasn’t in the top positions or a brand you recognize (which speaks to the importance of branding).

Back to my greeting at the top: My partner wanted to order from that same place again and it took us 30 minutes — both searching our inboxes, order histories and various food delivery platforms — to finally find the restaurant. “That is sad,” my colleague Barry Schwartz said when I told him about it. It is sad that platforms haven’t prioritized their internal search features to more quickly and accurately surface our historical interactions — if you’ve ever had to search by date in Gmail, you probably know what I’m talking about. This could have been lost business for that restaurant and, in a more general sense, diminishes our marketing efforts because it’s not very useful to be top-of-mind if the inability to locate a piece of crucial information prevents prospective customers from converting.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Business reopenings have flattened while new leisure and hospitality openings drove growth, according to Yelp

Eighty-five percent of temporarily closed businesses in the U.S. since the onset of the pandemic have reopened as of September 30, 2021, according to Yelp. In Q3 2021, new hotels (up 32% YoY), nightlife (up 30% YoY) and beauty (up 7% YoY) businesses drove openings, although total new business openings nationwide have flattened (increasing just 1% YoY). Consumer interest in the nightlife, fitness and entertainment sectors has also risen substantially — interest in dance clubs is up 67%, yoga is up 41% and indoor play centers are up 204%, for example.

Why we care. These statistics give us a general idea of how local businesses are operating and what’s top-of-mind for consumers. Business reopenings have decreased, which may mean that temporarily closed businesses are becoming less common and that local economies are adapting. While leisure and hospitality drove new business openings, these businesses may still be navigating a labor shortage, which can severely impact the ability to serve customers and undermine marketing efforts. The restaurant and food industry is facing a similar labor shortage, along with rising food prices, which may explain the diminished growth nationwide. In the nightlife, fitness and entertainment industries, consumer interest has exceeded 2019 levels across the board — save for movie theaters — which may indicate less hesitancy among consumers to engage in activities where social distancing is difficult or impossible.

These statistics can be interpreted as generally positive, but it’s important to remember that it’s historical data. The pandemic is still here and so are its side effects: Inflation is at its fastest rate in 13 years, there is a labor shortage in certain sectors, mask mandates remain in effect in some states, certain cities have vaccine requirements for indoor businesses and supply chain difficulties are trickling down to customers. In addition, we are approaching the holiday season, which saw a substantial spike in COVID cases last year — business owners and marketers should have a plan in place should history repeat itself.

Read more here.

Holiday sales are predicted to break a new record even though Cyber Week growth is slowing

U.S. online holiday sales will reach a new record, $207 billion, from November 1 to December 31, according to Adobe’s Holiday Shopping Forecast. That’s up 10% YoY, a strong growth rate after a year in which the pandemic drove customers towards e-commerce. However, major shopping holidays seem to be losing steam (see the chart above): While Cyber Week (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) is expected to drive $36 billion in online spending (17% of the entire holiday season), growth has slowed, coming in at just 5% YoY — half the rate of the season’s overall growth. Nevertheless, Adobe expects Cyber Monday to remain the biggest shopping day of the year, although the three major shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Thanksgiving) are growing less than the season overall.

Here are some more quick stats from the report:

• U.S. consumers will pay 9% more on average during Cyber Week this year, compared to the last holiday season.
• Out-of-stock messages are up 172% vs. pre-pandemic period (Jan 2020); and up 360% vs. Jan 2019.
• Online revenue from Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) this year has been 10% higher than 2020 and 45% higher than 2019. Shoppers are also using BNPL for less expensive orders, with the minimum order value dropping to $225 (a 12% decrease YoY).

Why we care. “We are entering a second holiday season where the pandemic will dictate the terms,” said Patrick Brown, vice president of growth marketing and insights at Adobe, “Limited product availability, higher prices, and concerns about shipping delays will drive another surge towards e-commerce, as it provides more flexibility in how and when consumers choose to shop.”

Additionally, Cyber Week’s diminished growth is something we’re also seeing for other major shopping holidays — Memorial Day, Labor Day and President’s Day grew on average 16 percentage points slower in two-year growth than the seven days leading up to them, according to the report. This may indicate that retailers are spreading out their sales over more days and/or a shift in when consumers are shopping.

After 13 years, Frédéric Dubut, principal product manager, core search & AI, departs Microsoft

After thirteen years, Frédéric Dubut, principal PM manager, core search & AI at Microsoft, announced his departure on Monday. Dubut has been an avid contributor to the search community, lending his insights into the inner workings of Bing for our Bing SEO guide as well as speaking at SMX on webspam and penalties, Bing’s “quest for intelligent search” and more.

Why we care. In addition to being an industry, search marketing is also a community of professionals that do our best to share what we know so that our colleagues and the brands they work for can succeed. In his role at Microsoft, Frédéric Dubut exemplified these qualities and greatly contributed to the industry’s understanding of how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks. Dubut has not disclosed where he’s headed next, nevertheless, we hope the best for him and are optimistic that whoever steps into his now-former role will also be a steward and advocate for SEOs.

Read more here.

Rethinking ROAS, the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and creative briefs

The ROAS pathology: How revenue-based optimization is selling you short. “As ad channels like Google Shopping become increasingly hands-off in nature, the true competitive advantage will not be in bidding itself,” wrote Mike Ryan, head of retail insights at Smarter Ecommerce, “But rather in being able to determine the actual ROI more realistically than your competitors.” Ryan’s article highlights the potential dangers of ROAS as a KPI and how advertisers can stay ahead of the competition by ditching this metric.

Dive deep into the refreshed Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. On Tuesday, Google announced an update of its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — the first update in over a year. Jennifer Slegg, founder of The SEM Post and SMX speaker, has published her very detailed guide to all the latest changes, even the ones not mentioned in the change log.

Types of creative briefs. This week’s Marketoonist pokes fun at the many approaches marketers and their agency counterparts take in coming up with a creative game plan. “Because most marketers give insufficient attention to the creative brief, this gives an advantage to the few that do,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne, “Inspired briefs attract inspired teams and lead to inspired work.”

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

• 5 principles of an ideal SEO team structure – Kevin Indig
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The post Consumer interest in nightlife, entertainment, fitness businesses surge; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Eighty-five percent of temporarily closed businesses in the U.S. since the onset of the pandemic have reopened as of September 30, 2021, according to Yelp. Overall new business openings nationwide have flattened out, despite the leisure, hospitality and beauty industries driving growth. And, consumer interest in nightlife, fitness and entertainment has largely exceeded 2019 levels.

New business openings flatten in Q3. In Q3, new business openings across categories held steady, reaching 142,328 — an increase of 1% YoY.

However, total new business openings for the first nine months of 2021 (439,094) still exceeded pre-pandemic levels for the same period in 2019 (433,243).

Leisure, hospitality and beauty drove new business openings. New business openings in leisure and hospitality on Yelp increased in Q3 2021 compared to Q3 2020, which was to be expected as the vaccine became widely available earlier this year.

In Q3 2021, hotels accounted for 3,514 new openings (up 32% YoY), nightlife saw 2,570 new openings (up 30% YoY) and businesses in the beauty sector grew by 11,029 (up 7% YoY).

New restaurant and food business openings remain steady nationwide. Similar to how new business openings across the board have flattened, new openings of restaurant and food businesses increased by 2% YoY, adding 19,892 new businesses in Q3 2021.

Growth in this category looks different when analyzed at the state level, quarter-over-quarter: Numerous states experienced an increase in restaurant and food business openings from Q2 to Q3 2021, including Alaska (up 36%), Connecticut (up 25%), Hawaii (up 19%), Maine (up 33%), Montana (up 13%), New York (up 12%), Rhode Island (up 24%) and Wyoming (up 22%).

As for reopenings, 83% of restaurant and food businesses that were temporarily closed between March 2020 and the end of Q3 2021 have reopened as of September 30, 2021.

People were very interested in nightlife, fitness and entertainment. In Q3 2020, nightlife businesses in many states were forced to close due to pandemic restrictions. A year later, consumer interest (measured by Yelp through interactions with businesses on its platform, such as viewing business pages, posting photos, reviews, etc.) in this sector has risen substantially — interest in dance clubs (up 67%), piano bars (up 58%), comedy clubs (up 79%), speakeasies (up 80%) and gay bars (up 38%) have all seen an uptick compared to Q3 2020 levels.

Gym and fitness classes experienced a similar surge in interest. In Q3 2021, pilates (up 54%), pole dancing classes (up 56%), aerial fitness (up 74%), yoga (up 41%), barre classes (up 42%) and saunas (up 55%) all surpassed Q3 2020 consumer interest levels. 

Additionally, increased consumer interest in bowling (up 116% compared to Q3 2020), waterparks (up 115%), axe throwing (up 107%), stadium arenas (up 96%), indoor play centers (up 204%), laser tag (up 77%) and amusement parks (up 70%) may indicate less hesitancy among consumers to engage in activities where social distancing is difficult or impossible.

Why we care. These statistics give us a general idea of how local businesses are operating and what’s top-of-mind for consumers. Business reopenings have decreased, which may mean that temporarily closed businesses are becoming less common and that local economies are adapting.

While leisure and hospitality drove new business openings, these businesses may still be navigating a labor shortage, which can severely impact the ability to serve customers and undermine marketing efforts. The restaurant and food industry is facing a similar labor shortage, along with rising food prices, which may explain the diminished growth nationwide.

In the nightlife, fitness and entertainment industries, consumer interest has exceeded 2019 levels across the board, save for movie theaters. This shift might be driven by the availability of the COVID vaccine and pent-up demand carried over from 2020 and earlier this year.

These statistics can be interpreted as generally positive, but it’s important to remember that it’s historical data. The pandemic is still here and so are its side effects: Inflation is at its fastest rate in 13 years, there is a labor shortage in certain sectors, mask mandates remain in effect in some states, certain cities have vaccine requirements for indoor businesses and supply chain difficulties are trickling down to customers. In addition, we are approaching the holiday season, which saw a substantial spike in COVID cases last year — business owners and marketers should have a plan in place should history repeat itself.

The post Business reopenings have flattened while new leisure and hospitality openings drove growth, according to Yelp appeared first on Search Engine Land.