Monthly Archives: November 2017

Your Customers Can Now Book Appointments Directly From Google Search Results

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Google rolled out it’s “booking feature” for selected businesses back in December 2016. Back then, it was only available for only spa and salon owners, and in selected cities. But now they have expanded it and more business owners can now allow their customers to book appointments directly from the search result. Here’s the official statement from Google – https://www.blog.google/topics/small-business/easy-booking-button-businesses-google/

Google-Local-Listing

All you have to do is to login to your Google My business Console. When logged in, you will see a new button “SIGN UP FOR BOOKINGS” within in the “Accept bookings on Google” section.

Google-My-Business-Dashboard

The next step is to select a booking provider. You can enroll with a scheduling provider from Google’s list here. Once you’ve enrolled, your business will be ready to accept bookings in few days.

Google-Scheduling-Partners

Once the integration is successful, you will be able to see how well your business is doing. You can track the number of bookings as well as how much money you’ve made from these bookings from Google.

But be informed that as of now, it’s only available to select business types and within the US only.

Google-Bookings

Google says it will be adding the booking option in other countries and business categories soon – so stay tuned!

How Google Local Search Works – Google Will Now Show Search Results Based on the Google Users Location Instead of the Domain Name

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Google’s paramount goal is to provide the users with most relevant search results. Today 1 in 5 searches on Google is related to location, so providing locally relevant search results is of utmost priority. Google is changing how Google local search works. Till now the country of service was indicated by the country code top-level domain name (ccTLD). For example “google.co.uk” for the United Kingdom. But from now on, Google will determine the country of service based on your location. If you’re in the UK, even manually typing “google.com” and searching something will not fetch you results from the USA, instead, it will show results based on your current location, i.e. the UK.

Google-Homepage

However, Google has cleared that they have just changed the way they labeled Google search results and maps, and not the way it works.

In case your country of service doesn’t change as per the location, you can update it by going into the Settings > Search Settings in the footer and then navigate to Region Settings.

Google-Region-Setttings

From the Google Search Blog:

So if you live in Australia, you’ll automatically receive the country service for Australia, but when you travel to New Zealand, your results will switch automatically to the country service for New Zealand. Upon return to Australia, you will seamlessly revert back to the Australian country service.

Google is hopeful that this update will ensure that the users will get the most relevant search results, and will ultimately improve the overall search experience.

man-holding-iphone

How To Move Your M-DOT URLS To New Responsive Website – A Step By Step Guide

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Google has released a 4 step tutorial on how to move your m-dot URL’s to your newly created
responsive websites in a “Googlebot friendly” way.

Below are the steps Google outlined (in green). Plus we have added our own steps in between
to give you a clear path to work on.

1. First Thing first, get your responsive site ready.seperating-mobile-URLs-diagram

2. Collect all the data from your M-dot website like conversion rate, traffic etc. So that you can compare it with the new responsive site & know how your new website is performing.

3. 301 redirect to the new responsive URLs from your old URLs. You will have to do it for each URL’s separately, it is daunting but necessary.

301-redirection-diagram

4. Sometimes, there are images or a white paper that is in use & ranking well. You will have to find them out and redirect them to your main site so that you don’t lose traffic.

5. Your site might have some Mobile-URL specific configuration like conditional redirects, make sure you remove it.

6. Setup rel=canonical on the responsive URLs pointing to themselves.

7. You can encourage the search engines spider to recrawl your M-URL by resubmitting your M.site Google search console & Bing Webmaster Tools Sitemaps. By doing so, they will reindex your site faster and become aware of the new 301 Redirects.

8. Keep an eye on the progress by monitoring the index status of the old M.site on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

9. In about 3 months or more, Google will drop the M URLs out of the index. But only after they become aware of the 301 redirects.

10. Update the important links to the Old M.site & have them point to the new URLs.

11. Make sure you change the new old M.site to the new one on all your marketing and promotional materials.