March 2020, Whitespark Local Insider Newsletter

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Keeping Your GMB Listing Accurate & Updated During COVID-19 Pandemic 

Businesses around the world are feeling the impact of COVID-19. Many businesses are implementing changes to their cleaning processes and opening hours, switching to remote work, and delivering their products and services online. Customers are increasingly searching online for up-to-date information about the status of local businesses, and their first stop is often the Google My Business Profile for the business.We've put together a guide on what Google My Business features you can leverage to communicate changes with your customers.  

Temporary COVID-19 Updates in GMB :

• Businesses can mark their listings as "temporarily closed" 

  • The ability to mark your listing as Temporarily closed has rolled-out in many dashboards. You can confirm that your business is closed and then reopen it when you are fully operational again. 

  • If the thought of using the temporarily closed feature is unsettling, you can instead use Special Hours to indicate that your business is closed right now. 

• Review functionality has been disabled. 

  • New reviews will not be published. A user can write a review, but it will not be published publicly and it will only be visible to the user in their contributions section on Maps.

  • Business owners cannot respond to reviews. 

  • The likelihood of these reviews being published once Google enables the review feature is slim, however, it's still unknown. We suspect Google has done this to prevent negative/irrelevant reviews during this unprecedented time.

  • Pause any of your automated emails going out to customers asking for reviews on Google until this feature is available again. 

• Questions & Answers have been temporarily removed.

  • Any new and any previously added Q&A's from business owners and users are no longer published on the Business Profile. 

  • The functionality has been removed by Google until further notice.

• Critical health-related businesses get priority.

  • The GMB support team has reduced capacity, so any business edits that require review before publication will notice a lag. 

  • Other top priorities for business edits go to open and closed states, special hours, temporary closures, business descriptions and attributes.

• New listings and verifications are delayed. 

• Restaurants, grocery stores, and breweries are now allowed to add "Delivery Available" or "Take Away" to their business name.

• Read Google's full announcement on the GMB features that have been limited.

From,Team Whitespark

Other Resources to Help Your Business During COVID-19

1. 🐞 Reported issues and feature bugs that some users are encountering in GMB. If you're updating your listing and have some issues, you're not alone. 

2. Facebook is offering $100 million in grants and ad credits to up to 30,000 eligible small businesses.💰

3. 🍺 Yelp has launched a relief package of $25 million to help support bars and restaurants. 

4. Schema markup for Coronavirus special announcements, COVID-19 testing facilities, and more. 📣

5. The importance of brands creating FAQs and Cornavirus pages fast, to answer customer questions. 🙋

6. 🆓 Pro bono local SEO help for businesses locked down by Coronavirus.

7. Nextdoor Launches Help map and groups to bring neighbors together. 🗺️

8. 🚪 Learn more about how to temporarily close your GMB listing.

9. How to build a "buy online, pickup curbside" store on Shopify 📦 (for brands new to the platform).

10. Learn how to host virtual events on YouTube 💻 and optimize your channel. 

11. 💥 What is the impact of Coronavirus to SEO? 

SENDING LOVE

We want to acknowledge how this is a challenging and uncertain time for everyone and that the situation continues to evolve day-to-day. We want to extend our hopes for your health, well-being, and safety.