🌴 A Note From The Jungle
Happy Monday! The temperatures are starting to cool, but marketing departments everywhere are heating up for the end of the year push and 2026 planning. This week’s Coconotes might be helpful if that’s you!
🦍 Ask GMB Gorilla
Hey GMB Gorilla…what’s the #1 thing I can do to get more calls and clicks from my Google Business Profile without a big budget?
Howdy human! This is a question we get asked every week. It’s especially popular with new businesses and customers who get their profile setup and wonder what’s next. While there are many things you can do on your own to help increase the visibility of your profile in order to get more calls and clicks, by far the most important activity is review solicitation.
Reviews on your GBP are used by Google in a variety of ways, from showing as justifications on your local pack listing, to having an impact on the actual ranking of your profile for certain searches. You might already know that reviews are important, but the reality is today most businesses are still not focusing enough on review generation.
Review consistency and recency are two important levers you can use to improve and maintain higher rankings on the Map. Google rewards profiles that are consistently getting new reviews, and given most customers only read the first few reviews, also rewards profiles that have recent reviews.
It’s also the one activity you can’t outsource to a third party. Effective review solicitation and ongoing generation requires internal effort by the faces and voices of your organization. Sure, you can “automate” with software, but those are just the interactions that a growing number of customers loathe.
Staying consistent (and effective) requires a plan and executing with intention. The businesses that are best at it are not simply automating, but making asking for a review and achieving a 5 star outcome part of how their business operates. Training staff on the interaction, elevating the metric as a KPI, and weaving in some fun such as internal contests can make it easier to ensure you get a review (or more) every week.
If you’re not already doing this now is a good time to think about it. You’re probably doing a great job…and could start booking a lot more of them through your GBP if it had more consistent new reviews.
🌴 Jungle Watch
Google Updates Business Links Policies and Guidelines
Google has updated policies and guidelines for Business Links on GBPs
Google is providing much clearer information: We saw this first mentioned by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, but these new updates confirm a number of things we’ve know for a long time. The most important updates we see in practice deal with location specific landing pages and crawlability of it (and the rest of the associated website).
Multi-location businesses should be using location specific landing pages: Google wants businesses to link to the specific location page if they have multiple locations versus a home page or other general internal page. This is similar to their guidance around phone numbers. While both of these make sense since they are locally focused products, many business push back when given this direction. It could to see some official clarity.
The landing page and website must be accessible by crawlers: We have seen GBPs suspended or fail to be reinstated due to a customer having a link to their site that 404s, has poorly implemented redirects, or is even compromised by a malicious hack. Google also now clarifies that the associated link should not be attempting to block or prevent crawlers from accessing it without restrictions.
We routinely advise single and multi-location businesses on these guidelines, so it was good to see Google provide more clarity we can point to. In general, Google has made solid strides this year to improving the documentation around Google Business Profiles.
🍌 Banana Bites
Google is testing offers inside of LSAs 👀 Reddit
Request Multiple Opinions functionality being tested in the local legal services finder. 🧑⚖️ Reddit
Free Local SEO Audits? Here’s why you should run and hide. 🙈 GMB Gorilla
🆘 Need GBP Help?
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Did You Know? Gorillas are very close relatives to humans, sharing about 98% of their DNA!
Till next time,