In June of this past year, as Google My Business Website reached the age of one, I noted that businesses had created 2 million of these single page mobile ready websites.

The rate of uptake, particularly in Asia and Brazil, has accelerated and there are now almost 12 million of these sites world wide. 10 million of these sites have been created in the past 3 and half months.

What has happened?

While growth in the developed world was solid, growth in Asia was spectacular. Both Indonesia and India have each surpassed 4 million sites in their countries. Indonesia saw monthly increases of 309% per month while India saw monthly increases of almost 200% per month. This incredible Asian growth story boosted world wide monthly growth to 125% growth per month.

The top 10 spots for the leader board of the countries with the most sites saw 9 of 10 countries the same as in June. Viet Nam, with monthly growth greater than 100% replaced Germany in the number 10 spot. And Indonesia’s outsized growth allowed it to take the number one position from India.

Some Factoids to Think About

• In going from 2 million at the end of May to nearly 12 million today means that Google has been adding almost 93,000 sites per day.
• India and Indonesia with 4.2 and 4.4 million sites respectively have created 72% of the sites.
• The other top 8 countries have created an additional 12% of the sites while the remaining 150 or so other countries in the world have created 12% of the total.
• Indonesia has been adding sites at the rate of 38,500 new sites per day.
• There are roughly 100-125 million businesses worldwide in Google Maps. This uptake of GMB Sites represents roughly 10% of those.

What does it Mean?

Google built Google My Business Websites for the “next billion” users or so they said. The reality is that in much of Asia, where the population never used the desktop web, Google had fallen way behind Facebook in SMB penetration & adoption. They had been marginalized. Google needed an “open web” so that they could leverage their existing technologies to understand what these many businesses were doing and where they were doing it.

When the open web never developed in that region as businesses and users jumped right to the Facebook app on phones, Google was confronted with an existential threat. The result, which has garnered them both basic business listing data and more nuanced information about the businesses there, was an “open web” created in Google’s image.

In this Googly version of the “open web” not only is Google able to control aspects like the speeds of these websites on mobile but is able to understand consumer behaviors when visiting them as well.

No Analytics needed here as Google already controls the whole enchilada. While Bing and Yandex can scrape these sites for inclusion in their indices the bulk of the data benefit accrues to Google and to some extent, the business creating the site.

The impact of these sites on the current ecosystem of websites in the developed world has so far been minimal. These sites are not (yet?) really a replacement for a well done website and they don’t offer anywhere near enough “juice” to compete in the world of SEO. But these sites do and can rank and they do in fact suffice for many low level uses.

What is turning out to be a competitive Asian strategy for Google to attract the next billion users (and several millions of businesses) could very well end up being a disruptive force to web development at some point in the future in the developed world as well.

When I helped start GetFiveStars, I did so with the idea that local businesses, small and big, deserved world class tools that helped them navigate and benefit from the world of reviews. And I also wanted to be sure that the agencies that helped them could leverage the more advanced features of these tools to help them on that journey.

It has been an exciting as I saw consulting ideas that I struggled to implement for 10s of businesses become a reality for tens of thousands of business locations. As part of that we, at GetFiveStars, always believed that if we could help local business develop the ability of listening to their customers that they would have achieved a certain “super power” towards becoming the great business that they wanted to be.Very early on we also recognized that these same businesses could use the reviews that they were gathering to share with potential new customers visiting their website or finding them on Google by embedding their own reviews directly onto their website. This helped with social proof, and improved their their seo. It dramatically simplified review schema for them and provided on-going source of fresh content for their website. This feature has gone through several cool revisions with a few more to come. Our Review Widgets  have worked well for businesses with one location or thousands as they communicated their strengths to the world.

Today GetFiveStars is releasing a new feature, the Conversion Pop-Up, that takes the idea of leveraging your reviews for marketing your business  one step further. The Pop-Up helps businesses share that greatness with the world more easily via a small pop up that can appear on the pages of their website, making hard earned reviews readily apparent as it rotates through them.

This new tool can be easily configured to show on one or many pages, link to a specific page and show first and third party review content. All with a small javascript snippet that works across almost every website type and host.

You can read more about the feature on our blog, watch it at the bottom of this screen or just ping me (mike@getfivestars.com) and I will be glad to show it to you.

You can see it in action on the following sites:

Barbara Oliver Jewelry
The Flooring Gallery (white label)

Google has been expanding the branded local search results. Most recently (last November timeframe) they added an About tab that included corporate information, often a link to wikipedia or the main corporate about us page and social links Today I started seeing the inclusion of a Posts Tab in these results.

Interestingly this is NOT the long awaited multi-location posting product but rather a way to show the Posts that originated from the local agents.

In this spotted example (mobile only) the Post shown under the tab is the post from the #1 listing. None of the other listings have posts so it is still unclear what would show if other locations had posted.

Would it just show posts from the top 3?

Would it dig deeper and show posts from the top 10 listings?

Did the local listing rank #1 because of the post?

Not yet sure.

Heck and who knows maybe this is a precursor the long promised, naught delivered multi-location Post product.

If you see this in the wild and can share examples with more than one post I would love to see them.

Here is what the Post looks like in the search result: Continue reading Google Adds Posts to Local Branded Search Results →

Tim Capper pointed out a few weeks ago How Google Exploits the Hospitality Industry for Profit.  Bed and Breakfasts are effectively treated as hotels on Google so they have to put up with all of that and then some.

Growing up my father raised dogs. When there was a new litter, the runt was often forced to the rear and maybe not able to get any “love” at all. My father would say: “They are sucking hind teat“. As Wiktionary points out it is a colloquialism that variously means:

• To feed from an inferior source of food.
• To be the youngest or most neglected child.
• To be last in line.

Bed & Breakfast operations are certainly all of that when it comes to Google and the hotel industry.

What got me thinking about this was a forum post that Joy Hawkins pointed out to me where the owners asks:

My GMB page has a blue Book a Room button that takes viewers to 3rd party booking engines. I want people to go to MY website and book, so I don’t have to pay the 15% commission. My website booking engine doesn’t even show up on the list!

How can I have my booking engine show up as top choice – or even better as the only choice?

The short answer; you can’t. At least not easily and certainly not without consequences. The long answer is even worse.

From Tim Capper:

Firstly you will need to contact all the OTAs ( Online Travel Sites ) and ask them to remove your hotel from their platforms.

Then for your own bookings to appear, you will either need to integrate your own booking system with Google Hotels API or use one of the parner booking sites.

Once integrated, you can then use Google Hotel Ads to Bid on your own rooms >> Yes you still have to pay Google to have your own bookings appear.

The thing you need to consider before removing yourself from all the OTA sites, is can you afford to do this – how visible is your website and GMB listing in organic searches. In other words, will people find you without using an OTA ?

What does Tim mean about visibility? Well it turns out that if you manage to get the booking button removed, your listing will literally sink to the bottom of the heap and show much less as the algo is tuned to show those listings with OTA availability.

Here is what Lisa Kolb of Acorn Internet Services, who specializes in the digital marketing for the B & B space, told me:

Regarding this sentence: “The problem is that if you stop working with OTAs your listing shows a whole bunch less in search as the algo is tuned to show availability.”

When a property chooses to NOT provide their availability to any OTA, their competitors who do provide availability typically show up HIGHER, based on the dates selected by the surfer. Thus the Non-Participating OTA property doesn’t show up less, they just show up lower in the Local Listings (typically below those that do have availability for the search dates).

This is such a complex issue for hotels and B&B’s. Their OTA strategy must be highly refined because that OTA reach isn’t just to Google (which is a biggie), it’s to other products such as some B&B directories, and also Trip Advisor (another biggie). And how you make (or don’t make) your property available ultimately filters down to each of these other systems, and can seriously affect your bookings.

Starting a B & B’s is often an act of love and not a totally rational business decisions. They often are shy of resources and have difficulty navigating the vagaries of the online world. Worse, they can’t very well afford to pay the highway ransoms that OTAs charge (25-50% of the booking fee). And yet they are stuck in this unenvious position by Google.

I think that you would agree that in affect they are forced to suck hind teat.

I just saw this Google My Business Insight feature: Queries used to find your businessSend feedback. Per Google these are “The most popular queries for your business by unique users”

I have been on a trip for the past week and less than observant of Insights so this could have shown up at any point and I wouldn’t have known.

That being said it appears that it is a useful upgrade to Insights. They currently are only showing for 1 month and 1 week but they seem to surface the kind of detail that has been harder and harder to find from Google:

Let me know how long you have been seeing this, if you have been seeing this, whether you find the data useful and how you might use it.

Google has confirmed that anonymous reviews have in fact been removed from public view. Their statement to me:

“We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.”

If you recall, on May 24th, I reported their disappearance with the article Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?.

Given the obvious angst that many small businesses were expressing, I reached out to Google for a comment and possible confirmation.  I received that today.

I tried to get it sooner and it wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part. But Google, in their (not so) infinite wisdom was unable to get me a statement.

In many ways, Google has become a more mature company in local  than the Google of old. As noted by David Mihm and I on Streetfight they have actively moved to develop and market their product on many fronts at once. They continue to roll out new features at a rapid pace and have improved dramatically in their ability to communicate to the small business owner.

And yet, when a small business reaches out to me proactively wondering, and many more asked me privately and on my blog for word, Google was not willing to share any details.

Obviously honest communication is KEY to a long term relationship that they might hope to develop with largely distrustful small business folks, These folks have been conditioned by Google to expect products to be pulled out of the market willy nilly and to not feel totally comfortable developing a strategic relationship with Google. This holds true for larger multi location businesses as well.

And yet most of the evidence points to a Google that has worked hard to “clean up its act”…. more reliable product fixes, regular roll outs, improved communications etc etc etc.

So why was it so hard for them to send a simple statement confirming the obvious?

As much as they have changed, they are still evolved from the Google culture. This culture, largely secretive and engineering driven, thinks that their actions have little impact and thus don’t have to be explained.

And yet in this case, while the aggregate impact of removing anonymous reviews is likely not large, the distribution of that impact is not even. Barbara Oliver, who started engaging her clients with Google reviews in 2009 lost 18% of her reviews. She felt like she worked hard both earning those reviews and in reaching out to customers. Way too hard to just lose them on a moments notice.

From her pov, and I agree, if Google has good reason to remove anonymous reviews  then the least is that Google owes her an alert and hopefully an explanation.

That didn’t happen in this case. When will we know that Google has moved on from their teenager mentality? We will know when Google understands and fully integrates the idea that they have a huge impact on the lives of small businesses folks and those folks, by virtue of embracing Google, deserve timely and honest communications.

On the one hand I am a bit of a Google fan boy when I see the largely positive impact that local search has on small local businesses. And yet for every cool free feature that moves them two steps forward in the local space, they inevitably remind me with a step back that they still don’t fully understand the world in which they have chosen to play.

May they become adults sooner rather than later.

From GetFiveStars, a new post about two business that are suing because of reviews (always a fascinating topic to me):  Reviews & Lawsuits – You Can Win for Losing and You Can Lose for Winning       

From LocalU, my weekly conversation with Mary Bowling: Important Links from Last Week in Local – June 11

From Streetfight with David Mihm (last week): Google’s Local Improvements—Posts Become Essential, and Mike Wins the Bet!

From Local U, a great discussion about how to interact with industry spokespeople. Also last week: Video Deep Dive: “Reading the Industry” – Discussion with Willys Devoll

Yesterday, Sergey Alakov and SearchEngineRountable reported a new siting in the Local Knowledge Panel: See What’s in Store.

Today, Google has announced on Inside AdWords that as part if its new inventory feed program, See What’s in Store will be a free feature.

From the Adwords Blog post:

Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. The new program allows point-of-sale or inventory data providers, like Cayan, Pointy, Linx and yReceipts, to provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of merchants, so they don’t have to create their own local product feeds. As an additional benefit, retailers can showcase their local inventory for free on the “See What’s In Store” feature on the search knowledge panel.

To paraphrase David Letterman, Google My Business Guidelines are like traffic signals to New Yorkers… just a rough suggestion.

Google clearly states in the guidelines that “your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find your business online….Including unnecessary information in your business name is not permitted, and could result in your listing being suspended.”

In this case the definition of “should” and “could” are sort of like Clinton and his verbal gymnastics around what the meaning of the word “is” is. Like “is” with Clinton, the words “should” and “could” do in fact have meaning in both objective reality and in the Google My Business Guidelines. The only problem is that they are different in both places. And it isn’t clear that Google ever plans to inform us of their intended meaning.

How do I know and many small businesses know this? Experience.

The telling example that comes to mind is a jeweler near Toronto. About once per quarter I blog about this and about once every month or two or three I edit their listing to the actual name, it gets approved and then shortly there after it returns to its adopted name. It’s quite an adoption too. It includes brothers, sisters and the kitchen sink as “Glitz Jewellery Boutique” becomes “Glitz Jewellery Boutique – Engagement rings, diamond jewellery and gifts in Vaughan” shortly after my many interventions.

For the record my edits have been approved by Google SIX times. The owners of the listing are probably swearing at Google for the ever changing suggestion in their GMB. Well at least they are visiting it often.

My only wish in this whole sisyphean tale is that my Local Guide edits counted as frequent flier miles instead of just the lame points I do accrue. I could at least be close to a vacation in some exotic place by now.

The search “restaurants in Mountain View” seems to be returning interesting test of late. Yesterday we saw a feature snippet, schema driven list replace the local pack.

In this test we Interesting Finds supplement the pack.

These were first spotted by Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineRountable in early April in the context of a Mother’s day search.

According to Barry these results “are AMP pages, with top carousel markup, so the images look good and the content loads fast on click.

It does look like not all of those results are powered by AMP, such as the bottom left one. But it does seem most are, which is why there are AMP icons on three of the four results.”

In the example below not all of the results are amp either. This is the first time that I have seen them in the context of a local search.