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Monthly Archives: February 2019

//February

Taking a Closer Look at Your Business

Google Street View technology provides the opportunity to give visitors to your Google Maps listing and your website the chance to take a ‘virtual tour’ through your premises before even setting foot anywhere near you.

When searching for businesses, consumers use mapping products 44% of the time.*

On average, 41% of these place searches result in an on-site visit.*

Choosing the right restaurant, bar or hotel can often be tricky, particularly if you haven’t been there before. With the updates to Google Street View, you now have the option to help build a level of trust by letting potential customers experience your location before they arrive.

By offering an experience which is immersive and fresh, a virtual experience can help to play a key role in drawing inspire greater confidence among prospective customer and visitors.

The Importance of Building Trust

Google quotes a survey** on their own website which highlights the positive impact that can be achieved by incorporating more images and offering a more immersive experience on your listing.

The parameters of the study are as follows:

  • An online survey was conducted with consumers who had searched online for a restaurant or hotel within the previous 30 days (using any device).
  • A total sample of 1201 respondents was collected between July 21st and August 2nd, 2015.
  • Different versions of a local business listing (one for a hotel, the other for a restaurant) were created to include basic info, photos and/or a virtual tour (the same media were used to create each version).
  • Respondents were asked to view one of the different versions for each business (in a randomised order). Each respondent viewed:
    • 1 hotel listing + 1 restaurant listing; and
    • 1 listing with a virtual tour + 1 listing without a virtual tour.

    Note: Presentation of alternate listings were randomized evenly and consistently throughout the field.

  • After viewing each listing, respondents were instructed to rate their interest in booking a reservation.
  • Ratings for alternate listings (with a tour versus without) were aggregated to understand the impact of virtual tours on interest in the featured business.

With 44% of consumers using map related products all of the time, this is an area which must be tapped into if you would like to take a step ahead of your competition.

Further Information

If you’d like to speak to us regarding any of our services, including our the creation of 360-degree images for your website and Google Maps listing, please give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.

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*Ipsos study [pdf in English]

**Download overview [pdf]

By | February 25th, 2019|Google Maps|Comments Off on Taking a Closer Look at Your Business
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The Basics of Google My Business

If increasing the visibility of your business in the local area is crucial to ongoing success, creating a Google My Business listing is absolutely essential.

Google My Business (GMB) – is a rarity in today’s world because it is a FREE tool to use. Absolutely perfect for any business owner looking to manage their online profile and showcase their products and services, GMB offers a very effective method of increasing your local exposure.

If you have any questions about the importance of Google Maps listings for small businesses and how they can be used to help you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on Tel. No. 01883 372488.

Features like ‘Google’s Local Search’ results (highlighted in the screenshot below) have been created to help provide a list of nearby business offering the products/services relating to your search. This in turn helps to highlight further information relating to each specific business in the listing including addresses, business hours, categories, contact details, reviews, images + more.

Once a new listing has been created and verified (a process of confirming that your business details are correct), a Google Maps location will be generated which filters seamlessly into the traditional Google Search results for easy access and increased searchability.

Introducing The Basics of Google My Business

A few tips include:

  1. Choosing The Correct Categories: Google provides an extensive list of categories from which you can choose. Simply choose the most relevant option from the available choices as your primary category and then choose as many as you can that relate to your products/services.
  2. Use GMB As A Social Media Channel: You can make your listing more attractive by adding posts, videos, images etc which can be posted through the GMB dashboard. Turning GMB into a Social Media channel, the most recent posts will be added to the bottom of your GMB listing during search results and images may also appear in Google Image search results.
  3. Encourage As Many Reviews As Possible: It is not possible to overemphasise the importance of reviews. Simply ask your customers to review and rate on your listing. Online reviews play a crucial role in helping to separate competing businesses and the chances are, the more positive reviews on your account, the higher your listing may rank and the greater confidence new customers will have that your services are reputable.

Further Information

If you’d like to speak to us regarding any of our services, including our online marketing services, please give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.

Currently Browsing: Saying Goodbye to Google Plus
By | February 18th, 2019|Google Maps|Comments Off on The Basics of Google My Business
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Saying Goodbye to Google Plus

With the news of another data leak, the borrowed time that beleaguered platform Google+ faced has been reduced even further and will now close for consumers in April, rather than 4 months later in August as originally planned.

The New Vulnerability

According to Google, the new vulnerability impacted 52.5 million users, who could have had profile information like their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to developers, even if their account was set to private. Apps could also access profile data that had been shared with a specific user but was not shared publicly.

“We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API. We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.

With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

Next Steps for Consumer Google+

All Google+ APIs will be wound down over the coming days as Google decided to give users ample opportunity to transition off of consumer Google+. Over the next few months, they will issue regular statements with additional information, including ways that data can be safely and securely downloaded to be migrated to other platforms.

A Note for Enterprise Customers

“G Suite administrators are always in control of their users’ apps. This ensures that G Suite users can give access only to apps that have been vetted and are trusted by their organization. In addition, we want to reiterate that we will continue to invest in Google+ for enterprise. More details were announced in October.”

What Comes Next?

With the recent updates to the GMB (Google My Business) dashboard, the ability to make posts, share images and provide general information has already ensured that many of the options which were available with G+ are now available elsewhere.

To see how GMB can be used to benefit businesses, especially those with a focus on local custom, please click here.

Further Information

If you’d like to speak to us regarding any of our services, including our online marketing services, please give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.

Currently Browsing: Saying Goodbye to Google Plus

 

By | February 11th, 2019|Google, Google Maps|Comments Off on Saying Goodbye to Google Plus
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2019 – The Year of Schema?

Whilst Schema coding has been around for some time, its importance is growing all of the time. Offering the ability to provide snippets of important information to Google in a format that is easy to read and understand, when used correctly, Schema can be a very powerful tool indeed.

What Actually Is Schema?

Schema was created as a result of a collaboration between the major search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex, with the goal of helping to provide webmasters with a method of supplying key pieces of information to their search engines.

With an increasing number of websites believed to use Schema.org to markup their web pages with many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex and others already using these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.

Improving Click-Through Rates

Whilst there is no guarantee that using schema to produce rich snippets will automatically result in higher rankings or top 3 search results, it can certainly help and can also be effective at improving the click-through rates for your website.

Even with some major companies starting to utilise this code, the vast majority of smaller business and smaller websites are not using them. By taking the time to implement the right coding onto your website, your pages may be able to stand out against your competitors in search results.

A Key Part of Future SEO Campaigns?

We strongly believe that there is nothing to lose by adding them to the coding of your website and it’s certainly possible that they may soon become an important part of any SEO campaign.

Further Information

If you’d like to speak to us regarding any of our services, including our online marketing services, please give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.

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By | February 4th, 2019|SEO|Comments Off on 2019 – The Year of Schema?
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