🔍 Carousels of reviews showing for local businesses

Dec 12, 2019

Good morning search marketers, watch your reviews.

If you've got local business profiles set up in Google My Business, take a look at your GMB listings from the local pack. You may see a carousel of reviews showing prominently on your local business profile. Google confirmed to us yesterday that the carousels may show if you have enough high-quality reviews. They may also show for Q&As.

Speaking of reviews, they continue to have a big impact on consumers — even as they are more aware of review fraud. That's according to a new BrightLocal survey that also found local search is on the rise, with younger users searching more often. Most consumers said they read reviews surfaced in search before they visit the website or physically visit a location. Recency and overall star ratings were the two most important features of reviews.

Whether your business is online, physical or omnichannel, you're likely to see that most of your customers' reviews are positive. Best practice is to ask all your customers for reviews (in an ethical way) on an ongoing basis across the sites that matter to your industry. In addition, respond to your customers' reviews — especially if they're negative, advises Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip from PPC veteran Fred Vallaeys on testing.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

The pitfalls of PPC testing methodologies

"One of the key claims to fame of search marketing is that it's more measurable. So whenever we try something new, we better have some numbers to back up our findings so we need to run experiments in a structured manner," explains Fred Vallaeys of Optmyzr. "One of the ways we do this is the before-and-after test."

"The simplest way to start a test is to make a change in a live campaign and then compare the results from before and after the change was implemented. The beauty of this method is that you can test anything in your ads account quickly. The downside is that while setup is super quick, measurement takes more effort and you can't have an apples-to-apples comparison because results may be impacted by external factors that change during the before- and after periods."

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AI and machine learning

Can a machine learning model accurately predict the outcome of what a customer will purchase based on past transactions? A sponsored article from Comarch explores the possibilities of Machine learning for next-best offers that creates big opportunities for creative marketers. Interested in learning more about how AI propels prescriptive and predictive campaign analytics? Join Resulticks for a webinar, The Fantastic 5: Emerging strategies to drive conversions & growth.

Search Shorts

10% of queries impacted by BERT global.

Still 10%. Even with the international roll-out of BERT, Google said 10% of queries are impacted, not more.

Realtor LSAs. It seems like Google is testing a realtor version of the Local Service Ads. This news is via Matt McGee.

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