February Local Insider Newsletter 

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Core Web Vitals Impact on Google Business Profile Landing Pages

We wanted to know if page experience signals affect local rankings, so we studied 4,500 Google Business Profiles and analyzed the landing pages for the top-ranking results. We ran Core Web Vitals diagnostics to see how they stacked up against Google’s page experience standards. Did higher ranking businesses have better Core Web Vitals scores?

Guide to Core Web Vitals

Need a quick refresher on Core Web Vitals? Check out this guide discussing the three core metrics and other page experience signals. 

Google Business Profile Updates

• Google announced that they are deprecating the Follow button (for businesses) and Welcome Offers. If you currently have an active welcome offer, it will remain on your GBP until the expiry date. 

• The appointment link briefly disappeared from the dashboard but is back with limited editing functionality. 

• Google has added some new review features to make leaving a review easier. You'll see pre-generated questions when you are writing a review (i.e. What did you get? Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Other) and a section that encourages adding photos. Local Guides are incentivized to use these features with extra points.

• The Questions & Answers feature is more prominent in Maps.  For businesses without any Q&As there's also a prompt for Maps users to ask the community a question.

• Google has launched a new API to pull call history data from GBP listings. Perhaps this means that the Call History feature is here to stay.

How to Remove Fake Google Reviews

We've updated our guide to removing fake Google reviews for 2022.

What Else We're Reading

Core Web Vitals: What Next?Fake Reviews: Bribing Yelp Elites, Amazon Sues10 Ways to Beat Google Title Rewrites, Backed by DataHow Performance Really Impacts Website Conversion Rate1-Star Reviews Have Increased on Yelp for 4 Years in a RowWhat Industries is Spam Fighting Effective In? (Forum thread) 

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