Time to catch up on the most notable local search happenings in the first quarter of 2024! Developments have calmed down a little since the absolutely wild Q4 we had in 2023 in local SEO, but there has still been major news. Sincere thanks to every eagle-eyed SEO who shared the news and noteworthy rollouts as they happened!

This is some of the biggest news of Q1. Joy Hawkins was the first person I saw reporting that her forum members were documenting significant changes in how local SERPs are being presented in the European Economic Area vs. North America.

How significant? Enough that Near Media needed to produce a visual glossary to help us all understand what the new elements are. Their outlet is doing a great job at tracking the ongoing evolution of what appears to be Google’s response to the requirements of the Digital Markets Act, which went into full effect in 2023. Watch a video demo here.

As Near Media reports:

“The six companies designated as "gatekeepers" under the DMA, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, ByteDance (TikTok), Amazon, must be in compliance by March 6, 2024.

That includes not giving preferential treatment to their own products or services vs. third-party competitors. Google has thus created a modified search results page and new search features for the 27-country European Economic Area across several verticals: Local, Travel, Products and Jobs.”

The upshot is that whether your clients or business locations are based solely in Europe or are global with some locations in Europe, you need to study these new SERPs to understand how consumers there are experiencing search. We look again to Near Media for early reporting on the impacts of these changes and also a good tip from Mike Blumenthal that North American agencies for whom European local search is critical can invest in the Nord VPN to experience overseas search.

It’s good news that European regulators are taking a strong stance on matters of anti-trust, privacy, and fairness, but it will be a bit more work for SEOs to study markets with differing search experiences.

The above screenshot comes from a tweet by TripAdvisor’s JC Chouinard reporting that mirror sites appear to be convincing Google that they are actually the sites of major travel industry brands:

JC Chouinard let me know he has not had any update on this issue since Google’s John Mueller said he would pass the report along to the correct people. As Barry Schwartz reports, who knows how much traffic is being lost to apparent spammers, and I am concerned about what might be happening to everyday people who are actually using these sites to plan trips. Doesn’t look good. I was recently listening to a call-in radio show in which people believe they are booking vacations in the Mediterranean, only to find no rooms have been arranged when they arrive… and after their money has been taken. The web can be a risky place.

As Sterling Sky reports, some 70 million Americans lost nearly $40 billion to phone scammers in 2022, alone, and you should be taking the steps their article and video outline for protecting yourself as best as possible. Chances are, you will receive some calls from scammers impersonating Google, often claiming something is wrong with your Google Business Profiles. While it’s possible that Google will actually call you, they will never ask for your banking information.

None of this is a new development. As I reported last year on the Irish locksmith listing swindle, scammers are everywhere now, and as we make our way through the first quarters of 2024, it’s important to remember to be skeptical of any type of call, text, or message urging you to take any action involving money or your personal or business details. Stop and think before you act.

Meanwhile, as Ben Fisher reports, if you are participating in Google Local Service Ads program to generate leads, be aware of this listing-hijacking technique:

It remains a matter of serious concern that Google is labeling participants in its paid advertising program as trusted providers when it is possible for bad actors to carry out this level of manipulation, linking two Local Service Ads to a Google Business Profile, causing the legitimate entity to disappear.

Google reps suggesting that the legitimate businesses start from scratch with a brand new GBP is disastrous advice for any brand that has worked for years to build up good metrics around their listing. I’m sincerely hoping Google addresses this severe trust issue. If a company is willing to engage in tactics like these to “get ahead,” they have no business serving the public and no business being labeled “Google Guaranteed.” 

As Barry Schwartz reports, Google now requires third-party ordering integrations to provide a "remove provider link" for easier removal from your Google Business Profile. As clarified by Claudia Tomina, the process for removing middlemen like GrubHub and Doordash isn’t new, but the link is:

This is noteworthy due to the history of concern surrounding some of these third-party ordering services’ business operations. In the past, local businesses found their profiles suddenly hosting these brands, without apparent permission. Anything Google can do to facilitate easier removal when a local business does not want to partner with a third-party is a good step forward.

In similar news, Glenn Gabe noted that Google is now scaling back its own third-party ordering service and redirecting to other resources. We can guess that the program wasn’t the success its developers hoped for, given Google’s statement that “people generally prefer to complete their food orders on partner and merchant websites.”

Darren Shaw has had the most reactive reporting, and in my opinion, the best response, to Google’s March shutdown of millions of small businesses GBP websites. The sites will redirect to Google Business Profiles for a few weeks and then all will be lost unless the affected business owners come up with a plan to replace their site.

I wrote this extensive piece on all of your options for free/cheap website builder program and included a mockup of a strong one-page website. Darren has taken the initiative to actually build and launch a replacement product: a $1/month website solution. If you’re looking for a very simple and inexpensive website provider, you won’t find one that gets local search more deeply than Whitespark, so I recommend checking their offering out if you or your clients have lost your GBP sites.

X continues to be rather an appalling scene, but it is still the place I head most often to see what my colleagues and peers are researching and writing about, and sometimes you get a treat of a thread like this one from Aaron Weiche in which he serves up a stack of conversion advice like a plate of hotcakes. Check out his highly-experienced tips on:

• Headlines

• Social proof

• Form submissions

• Authentic multi-media

• Texting

Succinct and really worth considering for the betterment of your business. Yum!

Khushal Bherwani spotted Google bringing up a feature labeled “Related categories nearby” that clicks to local stores that ostensibly have the product you seek. This is new to me, though there have been similar features in the past. I haven’t been able to reproduce this result yet.

I’ve got thorough image documentation in this thread on this news first reported by Sohan Jain. Your New Merchant Experience dashboard may now contain a card labeled “Add amenity map to your website.”

It's free to take a look at, but appears to ultimately be a paid product, the purpose of which is to allow brands to build custom maps displaying only those features that are relevant to their audience. For example, a hotel chain might build maps of nearby tourist attractions. Interesting development.

Hat tip to Elizabeth Rule for spotting this button that auto-generates a Google Business Profile description. This might be interesting to fool around with, just to see what Google thinks it knows about you, and there could be a use case for this feature in the instance of a business owner who needs assistance with a dominant language in which they lack full fluency. Beyond this case, though, I would hope most owners are capable of describing their own businesses succinctly because it will be table stakes to be able to do so across your entire local search content marketing strategy.

Check out Sterling Sky’s case study which has identified a good correlation between review recency and ranking movement. I really appreciate the studies this agency conducts on a regular basis, and this one adds more weight to the best practice of earning a steady stream of new incoming reviews on your Google Business Profile.

Video content now fills the organic SERPs, and without at least a couple of short films, the “images” section of your Google Business Profile is incomplete.

Learn to make a video like the one, above, for your local business or clients, for free, using Canva and this illustrated, highly-detailed tutorial I wrote this quarter. You don’t need a fancy phone or a lot of expensive tech or even professional design skills. If you’ve six good photos and a business logo, you can produce decent video content with music, text, and sound effects to be added to your listing, your website, your social channels, and even a YouTube channel. Video has never been hotter. Now is the time to get cooking with this if you’ve been waiting!

Speaking of your social media content strategy, Stefan Somborac caught this cool update to Google’s 'Manage Social Media Links' page stating that adding your social media channels to your GBP may result in your posts being surfaced there. It’s always good news when social content can be syndicated across multiple platforms, and this would be a great day to go add your profiles to your listing via the New Merchant Experience if you’ve not done so in the past.

I’ve saved what’s most important for last: Matt Tutt has conducted a vital industry survey on Climate Change and published the results at Search Engine Land. 90% of SEOs believe Climate Change will personally impact us. Many of us are already experiencing it and have clients whose businesses have been destroyed or damaged when their towns have been flooded, burned, and hit by extreme storms. Some of us may already have made operational decisions within our agencies, like not consulting with clients in the fossil fuel industry, or promoting sustainable swag instead of plastic at conferences we host, or finding green hosting for clients. Matt’s survey surfaces so much more we can do if we have the courage to speak up and be the change we want to see in our beloved world. Please, share this critical survey with your colleagues, clients, friends, and family.

And that’s a wrap for Q1. Hope the local new year is off to a great start for your local business and clients, and please check back in June for the next installment of this quarterly series!