Google wants to make search and actions from search fast, content rich and profitable. They want to become the place (not unlike Facebook) were people go, the consume, they buy. Unlike news organizations that have the chops to do AMP pages most small businesses will take years before they achieve that level of being able to hand over large content chunks specially formatted for display within Google’s presentation layer.<\/p>\n
Well the fast and achievable alternative for Google is to have small businesses put their content directly on Google and then just wait for the call.<\/p>\n
Over the past two weeks we saw several “experiments” in the local space. Google rolled out a click to call phone number<\/a> associated with a web page result. At the time these results were only showing on page two of the search results. Google also allowed some small businesses to create a content stream directly<\/a> in search via their new Google Posts product.<\/p>\n This search result which was showing One Pack two weeks ago and a 3 pack this past weekend is now showing no pack results but lots of local information in the form of phone numbers (both paid and free) on the first page AND content directly posted to Google via Google Posts.<\/p>\n Is this type of search result possibly the future of local search?<\/p>\n
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