Google Maps Is About To Become Even More Useful!
Google Maps really has revolutionised navigation when travelling. The directions when travelling by car are incredibly useful but if you have ever used the ‘walking’ option, you will notice that is lagging a little behind. Imagine though how much better it would be if you can access the same turn-by-turn navigation options for walking as you can when driving. Not only this though, but also the directions will be overlayed on the real-world objects in front of you!!
At their IO developer conference in May, Google announced this amazing new ‘Live View’ feature is being made available as a beta feature using augmented reality (AR) to give real-world directions.
Please Note – I/O brings together developers from around the globe for talks, hands-on learning with Google experts, and the first look at Google’s latest developer products.
This is currently rolling out to a variety of Android phones that support ARCore and iPhones that support ARKit, including:
Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a and the Pixel 3a XL; the Huawei P20, P20 Pro, P30 and P30 Pro; the Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, Galaxy S10+, Galaxy S10 5G, Note 8
See Live View in action below.
(Image credit: Google)
Please Note – Google says you can expect to see flight and hotel reservations, Live View (in countries where Street View is available), and the new Timeline on your phones in the coming weeks.
Additional Updates
In the bid to become the proverbial ‘one-stop-shop’, Google also announced a number of other updates. To see more about these new updates, 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.
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Has Your GMB Listing Recently Been Suspended?
As we highlighted in a recent blog, there have been a number of updates to the GMB dashboard, including the option to claim a new short profile name for your listing. The transition to this new updated dashboard has not been without teething problems though and a large number of profiles were suspended (through no fault of their own).
There are a lot of rumours and suspicions that the Google My Business suspensions were due to the release of the new short-names feature but there is no official confirmation that this is anything more than a coincidence. As further evidence, there were actually many reports of suspensions well before the launch of the short-names release.
A little digging has highlighted the fact that the suspension issues spiked around June 12th and have only escalated from there there. The release of short-names was around June 20th. And Google admitted in late June the Google My Business team is facing a severe backlog in dealing with enquiries.
“Update: Google My Business support delays
Our support team is currently experiencing an unusually high volume of requests. We’re working as quickly as possible to address these issues.
If you want to request reinstatement for a suspended listing, please complete the reinstatement request form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Current waiting times are 2–3 weeks, and longer in certain cases.
Thank you for your patience as we work through this backlog. Resolving these waiting times is a top priority for us.
Please refrain from filing multiple requests or contacting us via multiple support channels as it may only cause further delays.”
Have your had any problems?
Have you experienced any problems with your listing? Have reviews been disappearing? Has your listing disappeared completely? Let us know.
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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It’s Time To Start Loading Up GMB With Images!
We live in an age where sharing images is common place. For business already utilising platforms including Instagram, TripAdvisor and Yelp it is difficult to overestimate just how important quality images can be. Even now though, things have just been taken up a notch.
As the saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and the ability to visually represent your business in terms of products and services offers the chance to give potential customers a valuable insight into what they will be getting for their money before they even make contact with you.
With the recently revamped Google My Business dashboard offering greater prominence to images, it is clearly more important than ever to do all that you can to ensure that your business looks its best at all times.
To help back up this theory, a recent study makes for some interesting reading.
How important are Google My Business photos to local search performance?
As part of a recent Google My Business Insights Study, the insights of almost 50,000 businesses in 36 industries across 4 countries were studies to see if any common data streams could be found and the one below stands out from the crowd – Businesses which upload more photos to their GMB listings receive more clicks, calls and direction requests than businesses that don’t.
By ensuring that you continue to upload quality images on a regular basis along with following the tops below, you can take large strides towards ensuring the maximum levels of visibility for your business:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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