Recent Google changes you need to know about

Google is constantly making updates to its products and testing new products and designs and we know between checking guests in and out and making breakfasts, it can be hard to keep up! So, we rounded up some of the recent changes Google’s implemented or testing so you can stay up to date with the search engine giant.

Google My Business

Google My Business has rolled out a few changes including enhanced insights and moving editing tools. With enhanced insights, you’ll now be able to see total views of your business’ page, where visitors are coming from, and the method they used to find your business page. With its tie to Search and Maps, Google My Business pages are now easier to find and you can tell what Google product people are using to find you. Are they looking up your location on maps or did they find you doing a simple search?

Photo credit: Google

Google even takes it a step further with showing you what way people found you in a search query. Visitors could find you by using your business name or address or by looking up related keywords associated with your business. For example, “inns in Denver.” On the downside, you won’t be able to see exactly what keywords brought them to your page but it’ll give you a good idea of the breakdown of how people find you, whether direct our through discovery.

Another change to Google My Business is how you edit your business description. Essentially, it was removed from Google My Business and can now be edited on Google+. Some sources cite that other businesses used this area as a place to stuff keywords instead of providing valuable information to online searchers. This description wasn’t shown on Maps and was only viewable on your business’ overview page.

You can still edit it at aboutme.google.com, selecting your business’ profile, and editing its story. Google has shown to favor its own descriptions being generated from its knowledge graph but we’ve found that sometimes those descriptions or amenities are incorrect.

Google Search Console

Google, we’ve got a problem. Google recently confirmed that its Google Search Console’s Index Status report is broken which in plain English means that Google may not be showing you the correct count of pages the search engine has indexed. Google is working on a fix and this impact shouldn’t have too much weight on your site’s performance.

SERP cards

Our friends over at Moz have been looking at recent changes to the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and noticed the testing of a card design:

Photo credit:Moz

Google has made some significant changes as it works toward a mobile-first platform and ensuring a consistent experience across devices and this card design could be a part of that. Another theory is that it’s replicating the look of Google Now and providing results as standalone results spanning a wider variety of sources. It could also be the way forward as we conduct searches on smaller devices or rely on voice search and information needs to be more consolidated or coming from a single card.

Photo credit: Moz