This week on Local Search Tuesdays, I’m talking about a fantastic new update to the Google Maps app! The sleek new carousel shows off your photos, videos, and review snippets—and it’s a game-changer for attracting customers.
I’ll be sharing simple tips to optimize your profile and how you can take advantage of this awesome new feature!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. Today, I’m talking about an exciting new update to the Google Maps app… And how it can help your business win more customers.
OK, I’ve gotta be honest here, I’m piggybacking off of Darren Shaw with this one, but it’s too exciting not to talk about this week. Darren pointed this update out on LinkedIn, and it’s so rad, I had to share it here with you.
Google quietly updated the Google Maps app, and there’s a super slick new carousel added to businesses. Check it out – how there are different sized tiles in a horizontally scrolling carousel. Not only does the carousel show photos from your image gallery and reviews, it shows videos. The coolest part is the little review snippets that are displayed. This one’s for Pequod’s Pizza, but it’s not just for restaurants…
The new carousel appears on all new businesses. I want to point out something really cool – se e how the review snippet shows a keyword and a number at the top of the box? If you click on the snippet, a new window pops up. A photo is displayed at the top of the window, followed by the keyword and the count of reviews that include that keyword.
Underneath, you’ll see snippets from reviews that included the keyword, followed by other photos from the image gallery or reviews related to the keyword.
Sure, I know what you’re saying, and I get it. It’s the Google Maps app, which likely has a lot less traffic that actual Google. You’d be surprised at how many people use the Google Maps app – but regardless, why not try to optimize this experience too?
The easiest way to optimize for the experience is to get your customers to leave more detailed reviews, and to be sure they’re more likely to upload a photo with their reviews. Way back in the summer of 2020, I did an episode of this series talking about a tactic you should use to help influence which keywords people use in their reviews. If you haven’t watched it, you can check it out at bit.ly/keywords-in-reviews.
Basically, if you set up a page on your site to send customers to when you ask for reviews, that page should have a simple thank you message, a request to leave a review, and links to your review profiles. If you also add a bit that says something like “the best reviews offer a detailed description of your experience and helpful tips for future customers. Here are a few questions to consider when writing your review” followed by 2 to 3 questions, you can influence what people write without specifically telling them what to include in the review. You’re not technically allowed to tell people what to write, so this helps guide them without specifically telling them what to include.
Also, make sure you upload videos to your GBP gallery so you get cool visuals like this:
The size for uploaded videos is either 75mb or 30 seconds of length.
So now you know about the awesome new update to the Google Maps app and how to optimize your profile to take advantage of the sweet new carousel. That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
