On June 18th Google announced their new Carousel which displays search results for local restaurants, bars, hotels and local attractions such as museums on your desktop. Go and type in “restaurants” or Museums Boston” and you’ll see an interactive “carousel” of local results at the top of the page.
This video blog post goes over what we found by poking around and testing it.
Tips for local restaurants, bar, hotels, etc:
[ba-list style=”star”]- Claim or add your Google+ Local page if you have not done this yet.
- Optimize your Google+ Local page with some great high quality photos and be sure to fill in all information about your business.
- When users click on your business in the carousel it brings them to your organic listings. If you have a Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local or other business listings (citations) make sure you claim and optimize them. Start with Yelp since it’s one of the most important. If you have any negative reviews on Yelp or any of the other sites, respond in a pleasant manner and propose to talk about the issue “offline” or say something like “We truly apologize for the experience you have had. Customer satisfaction is important to our business” and offer a small discount. Don’t use my exact words, these are examples only. Yelp includes good tips on responding to reviews. In order to respond to Yelp reviews you need to claim or add your page. Go to www.biz.yelp.com.
- speaking of reviews, put a review plan in place – for now “Ask” your customers for a review. Make it easy by giving them instructions. They need to have a Google Account! For more on what to do about reviews, checkout Phil Rozek’s blog post “The Complete Guide to Google+ Local Reviews – and Especially How to Get Them”. It’s the best post I’ve seen written so far on reviews and I’ve done a couple myself.
Q & A on the Google and Your Business Forum about the new carousel
Jade Wang from Google who specializes in local search and Google+ Local makes the announcement on Google and Your Business Forum and answers some questions you might have.
Wrap-up
We hope you enjoy the video blog post of the new carousel. As changes come in, as they always do with Google, we will keep you updated. Please let us know what you think and point out anything missed in the video blog post.
elSue will be providing On-site and Google+ Hangout training on “How to Put a Review Plan in Place” with step-by-step interactive instructions. Please sign up for our Newsletter in order to receive the update of when we will start offering this training.
