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The campaigns are almost entirely automated, from ad creatives to delivery optimization, based on the product or service being advertised and the goal the advertiser sets.

Smart Campaigns are built on AdWords Express technology, and Spalding says the company will continue to develop on it.

Smart Campaign ads can be delivered across Google’s properties, and users do not have the ability to turn off channels

Google said that the top 5% of local businesses in a category will be awarded a “Local Favorite” badge. Google was vague about what criteria will be used to determine who qualifies. The company generally said that it would reward businesses that kept their profiles updated and were responsive to their customers.

When a consumer searches or inputs the URL, it will lead directly to the merchant’s GMB profile. In the near future, users will be able to search Google Maps for @shortname and bring up the profile as well.

Enhance your image searchesFor those what-the-what? moments where a certain image needs more context, try downloading it to your computer first and then dragging it into the search bar on Google Images. With any luck, you’ll get search results related to the image you dragged in there, along with some other similar images. There’s also a less-fun way to do this: click on the Camera icon on the Google Images search bar, at which point you can paste the image in question via its URL or upload it from your computer directly.

When this business claimed its Google My Business listing, it severely reduced the company’s sales. It turned out that once the business was verified, Google thought that the customers were located in the Chicago area. Google verified the company’s local listing via postcard, and Google began to list the business in the Google Maps listings.

for online businesses with primarily nationwide or international customers that do not buy at physical locations, it makes no sense to claim local listings.

Do you have a brick-and-mortar location(s) that shoppers visit? If so, claim your local business listings. Do you visit your customers at their location? This could be, for example, a service business, such as carpet cleaning. If so, claim your local listings. Do the search queries (keywords) from visitors to your website typically include a city name? If yes, you should claim your local listings.

search volume in Google Adwords is a “rounded annual average,” which is not accurate by definition. A good example is the keyword “Christmas”—people don’t search for “Christmas” in July, so the “annual average” number applied to the month of July doesn’t make sense

Google AdWords combines keywords for search volume. Try “seo” & “search engine optimisation”; they have the same search volume according to AdWords

Different keyword research tools update their search volume data (by pulling it from AdWords) with varying frequency. This is why the search volume for the same keywords will often vary;

Google, in their recent positioning of Maps as both a better local discovery and social play, may be trying to grease the skids of Maps ascendancy by directing more traffic to that subdomain.

Posts can be up to 1500 characters, but 150–350 characters is advisable.

Google has let Top Contributors to its forum know that it’s okay for businesses to contribute knowledge to their own Know This Place section

Review snippets This section of the Knowledge Panel features three excerpts from Google-based reviews, selected by an unknown process.

I didn't opt out, why is my page not transcoded? Due to technical limitations, some pages cannot be currently transcoded. These pages will also be labeled as non-transcoded in search results. This includes:  Sites that require cookies (e.g. personalized site or sites that require you to login before using them)  Sites that use a significant amount of data (e.g. video sites) Other sites that are technically difficult to transcode.

Pages are currently transcoded for searches from the Chrome browser and the Android browser (version 2.3+), as well as Google Go.

Pages will be transcoded only for users on mobile phones

When you search for an image on mobile in the U.S., you might see information from the Knowledge Graph related to the result. That information would include people, places or things related to the image from the Knowledge Graph’s database of billions of facts

reporting 50 examples of keyword stuffing, and in that study, Google took action on 40% of them. Some businesses were given a soft suspension, and others were given a hard suspension.

once you get to a point where the entire market is adding descriptors to their name, the ranking power that the keywords provided will diminish. So now you are left with a branding mess and no ranking benefit. We are already seeing this happen in several markets. 

unlike the other three types of posts, COVID posts get their own special spot in the knowledge panel.

the average click-through rate on all the posts in our study was half a percent

when you are tracking the results from posts, that what you see inside Google My Business Insights is not going to match what you see inside Google Analytics.

COVID posts and offer posts get more clicks than event posts and update posts.

Google posts that contain images which are not stock photos get 5.6x more clicks.

If you want more activity from Google posts, include a call-to-action, a sense of urgency, and post about specials or discounts.

Sites that use nofollow for crawl control. For sites with large faceted navigation, nofollow is sometimes an effective tool at preventing Google from wasting crawl budget. It's too early to tell if publishers using nofollow this way will need to change anything before Google starts treating nofollow as a crawling "hint" but it may be important to pay attention to.

Nofollow has always been a very, very poor way to prevent Google from indexing your content, and it continues to be that way.

Based on Google statements, it seems you can still attempt to use nofollow in this way, but after March 1, 2020, they may choose to ignore this. Any SEO using nofollow in this way may need to get creative in order to prevent Google from crawling unwanted sections of their sites.

Small ranking changes consistently happen when your re-run ranking reports in competitive industries.

like many of the Google My Business features, we found that the services menu has no impact on ranking.  Wondering which fields do have an impact?  See our articles on categories, the business name, reviews, & the website field.

State of the Local SEO Industry 2020 survey found that, out of all factors, GMB elements (which include categories) have the greatest impact on local pack rankings.

take your list of keywords and enter them into your choice of free or paid keyword research tools to discover which terms have the highest potential search volume.

Finally, refine your list down to a smaller set of terms that combine the highest search volume with being most relevant and important for your company. In most cases, this is the list you’ll move ahead with, although there are some cases in which you would choose to target lower volume search phrases because they are either a) less competitive, or b) a more exact description of what your business is.

the real value of the badge is the access it provides to Local Services Ads (LSA). This is Google’s local trust pack. It is a cost-per-call advertising inventory unit that acts unlike anything we have ever encountered as marketers.

Badges are earned within two distinct programs – Google Guaranteed and Google Screened.

This year, Google solidified the growth intentions behind its newly minted trust layer, with the launch of Google Screened for Professional Services providers. This program is for lawyers, financial planners, real estate agents, photographers, event planners, and tax specialists.

While Google is more likely to rewrite meta descriptions for long-tail keywords, it’s only by a small margin.

Surprisingly, it seems that keeping your meta descriptions within limits doesn’t change the probability of Google rewriting them much.

Relevant and compelling meta descriptions entice clicks, so they’re still worth writing—even though they’re only shown only 37% of the time, on average.That said, if your site is huge, it pays to prioritize pages that:Already get organic trafficWere created to rank in GoogleAre likely to get shared on social media (where the meta description will be used for the social snippet description in the absence of OG tags)

Google said it can recognize and understand if a site is reputable about a specific topic area. John said it does make sense for sites to really hone in on their subject matter expertise because what "you're essentially doing is on the one hand for search engines you're kind of building out your reputation of knowledge on that specific topic area."In addition to this, John Mueller said that this can help the site also surface in the Google search results "for the broader topic" as well. This seems to show Google does have a way to understand the site as a whole, on the site level, not just on a URL by URL basis.

Which is my canonical URL, according to Google? Use the URL Inspection tool to learn which page Google considers canonical. Note that even if you explicitly designate a canonical page, Google might choose a different canonical for various reasons, such as performance or content.

Verification also allows some to participate in Posts on Google.