Updates to Google My Business That Could Impact Your Local SEO

Liza Rodrigues • Mar 24, 2020

In the midst of a public health emergency throughout the globe, small businesses are also facing financial hardship. For those that have invested in efforts in local SEO, it is important to stay on top of updates made by Google that could affect your results.

Last Friday, Google published a post announcing the suspension or limitation of a number of its Google My Business features, including new reviews and Q&As. As in all business, big or small, the well-being and safety of employees has become paramount. This is not different for the giant Google. They announced that since this new way of working would likely cause delays, they will be prioritizing their critical services.

Suspended Features

New Reviews

No new reviews will be published for this period of time, with the exception of “reviews for edits critical to health-related businesses”. Google will also prioritize the reviews for open and closed states, special hours, temporary closures, business descriptions, and business attributes edits for other verified businesses. Business attributes are the details that customers are able to submit about businesses.

Review Replies

Businesses will not be able to respond to existing reviews. This is obviously less of an issue since no new reviews will be coming in.

Questions and Answers

A very significant update will be the unavailability of Q&As, existing and new. No new questions can be added to your profile.

What You Can Do

Update your profile to inform customers of your current status. There may be a delay in their publication to your profile, but get the updates in the queue.

This includes:

Update Your Business Hours

If you have updated your business hours, update the time in your profile.

Here’s how to change business hours.

Manage Your Profile Description

Inform you customers with how your business has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps you have slower services, or your team is working remotely, or perhaps you have restricted the way you take orders. Whatever your particular situation, your customers will appreciate being informed.

How to change business description.

Create a Post on Your Website

Create regular content on your website to keep you customers informed. Our daily lives are currently completely dependent on what our government has outlined for us. Therefore, your business will adapt to the daily changes. Write regular content, or blog posts, to outline these updates.

Actively Inform Your Customers of New Updates

Now that you have the content on our website, send out regular emails with updates that link to more details on your website. Your paying customers will want to be the first to know of any changes they can expect from you.

How to inform your clients.

Example of content included in your Google My Business block:

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Do you have any questions on the above, or would you like to share your experience? Just email ideas@mawazo.ca or call +1 (833) 503-0807.

At Mawazo Marketing we work with owners of B2B companies who want to accelerate their business. We help them with a concrete digital growth plan, a website that saves operational cost, and a digital marketing system that generates leads. For qualifying clients we offer a 5x ROI guarantee: if we don't reach the objective, then we pay back the difference. Book a Free Strategy Session to find out more.

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