Q4 has snowed local search developments and hailed experiments! It’s been the most active quarter of 2023 in terms of local SEOs spotting new things, and possibly the most active since I started writing this quarterly series. While I normally have a dozen or less changes to report to you, Google has brewed up a blizzard of interesting new opportunities for us as we close out the year. Strap on your snowshoes, and I’ll guide you through this flurry!

1. Sterling Sky captures hours impacting local pack rankings

Joy Hawkins and her team announced at a webinar I attended in mid-December that they had captured massive local ranking shifts based on whether businesses were open or closed at the time of search.

Stan Kolev then took this example further, demonstrating this behavior:

Somewhere in the world, it is 5:00 p.m. ... in this case almost 9 but you can always check if the business hours are a ranking factor. This is maps results, just refreshing the page, nothing else. @mblumenthal @JoyanneHawkins @ColanNielsen @rustybrick @Kevin__Pauls pic.twitter.com/TCcwvZB9IK

— Stan Kolev (@stankolev) December 10, 2023

While this behavior on the part of Google has long been a subject of speculation in the industry, and multiple local SEOs have noticed hints of it over the years, what Sterling Sky has discovered appears to be an immense uptick in this behavior, which is repeatable and able to be documented. If it is not a bug, then it is, indeed, a newly confirmed local search ranking factor.

Early thoughts on this:

• This will tempt local business owners to set their hours as open 24/7 so that their rankings don’t fluctuate like this. I can’t advise this, as more than 50% of reviewers say they write negative reviews after encountering misinformation on assets like local business listings. Inconveniencing customers with inaccurate business details will likely erode your star rating, so that’s not a good strategy.
  
  

• An alternative I’ve suggested in the past is likely a better bet: if you are noticing this Google behavior in your results, audit the open hours of your competitors to analyze whether you might add to or alter your real-world hours slightly so that you are open when others aren’t.
  
  

• If you regularly run local ranking reports for your business or your clients, figure out how the time at which you’re conducting them may be impacting your results. You might want to run more than one report per day to get a sense of how open hours may be shaping overall visibility.

Sincere thanks to Joy and her crew for sharing this fascinating news with us all!

2. New identity attributes

Hava Ha was the first to draw my attention to these two new attributes — disabled-owned and Indigenous-owned, which you can add to your Google Business Profile (GBP) if applicable.

These attributes can improve the ease with which searchers can find and choose businesses that match their values or enable them to demonstrate allyship.

3. A new small business attribute

Google announced a new small business attribute, and it sounds like a great idea, though Carrie Hill’s attempt to get more information about it from Google support leaves quite a few open questions.

Whether you select the attribute yourself or Google assigns it to you based on what they believe about your business, it’s meant to show up in search, Maps, and even in product blocks:

I see this as one more step on Google’s part to localize their results, but as I noted in a recent column, Is the Nearby Filter Nav Actually Making Google’s SERPs More Local?, there’s a disconnect that’s a significant barrier to search accurately representing the real diversity of truly local shopping options.

4. Gym attributes

If you’re marketing a gym, Damian Rollison has good news for you in the form of these extensive attributes he spotted in November.

As he notes, this is almost as detailed as a hotel listing, and should help customers select a business based on the specific fitness options they’re looking for.

5. Attributes warning!

Please read Darren Shaw’s entire Twitter (X) thread on this weird scenario, which I’ll sum up as:

• You may not want to select the “on-site services” because it overrides the “Provides” justification.

• If you then try to set the attribute to “no,” you get this awful result of the SERP telling customers, “on-site services not available.”

Unfortunately, as you’ll see in Darren’s thread, attempting to get help from Google’s support on this has been unhelpful. It’s a bug/feature they need to fix.

6. A change to Local Service Ads

Crystal Horton mentioned it on Aaron Weiche’s podcast, and then Joy Hawkins did a full writeup and video of her own, which you should watch here:

TL;DW:

• Desktop LSAs have changed from showing three ads to just two, and mobile is now only showing three about 50% of the time
  

• The frequency with which Google is rotating the ads has greatly increased, making it harder for entrenched advertisers to remain dominant in this paid display and possibly easier for newcomers and SMBs in less competitive verticals to gain visibility.
  

• Google makes more money from this display — surprise!
  

• Desktop vs. mobile LSA results are not the same — Joy’s team at Sterling Sky found a mere 11% match between the two in a test they ran.

7. Chat with a live agent comes to desktop

The good folks at Whitespark summarized why you might want to consider signing up with a third-party service like Leadferno to make this very catching “chat with a live agent” appear on your GBP.

Some customers don’t love talking on the phone, and enabling this feature might increase your appeal.

8. Google Business Messaging FAQs

Google is keeping Claire Carlile busy updating BrightLocal’s guide to Google Business Profile Messaging and Chat.

Give that a read, and consider adding both custom and automated responses to your messaging for FAQs like “What time are you open?” or “What’s your website address?” It could save you some time and ensure customers receive a very fast response, which could assist conversions.

9. Dietary preferences gear

Shameem Adhikarath brings us the appetizing news that Google is testing a little gear icon that lets searchers set their dietary preferences, such as “vegan,” “gluten-free,” and cuisines such as “French.”

If you get to try it, it should result in Google customizing your local packs to better match how you’d like to eat. This could be good for restaurants that go the extra mile to serve diners with diverse dietary needs.

10. Activities for lodging establishments

If you’re marketing any type of lodging establishment, check to see if Google is offering you a new “Activities” tab in your New Merchant Experience editor, as spotted by Sohan Jain.

Barry Schwartz has more extensive screenshots in his article, and Claire Carlile’s piece takes a deep dive into the related ‘tickets’ tab for attractions. Still, some confusion remains about whether this “activities” setting is available just for hotels or all lodging establishments, like B&Bs.

If you see it in your NMX, you can use it to highlight things your guests can do while staying with you, like booking a nearby bike tour or other activity. The fullness of such information could help searchers decide your lodging is located in a very happening place!

11. 3 is the magic number for Place Topics

Just as a reminder, Place Topics are the rows of heading tabs that appear above your Google reviews, like this selection labeled “crepes,” “savory,” “vegan,” etc.:

Place Topics aren’t a new GBP feature, but Darren Shaw’s tip about them is definitely new to me:

Darren is observing that it only takes three mentions of something in your reviews to cause a Place Topic to appear. While this isn’t really directly actionable for local business owners, I find it interesting because it shows how much of an experiment all GBP features are.

In Darren’s example, three review mentions of the word “girl” have made that word a Place Topic for a marketing firm. Is this terribly helpful for the user? Probably not.

I’ve done quite a bit of research and writing on Place Topics over the past few years because I find the data they contain insightful, but I’m not sold on their lasting usefulness to searchers, and this example illustrates why that is. Will Place Topics last in 2024? We’ll see!

12. Herbivorous happiness via justifications, image labels, and CTAs

Plant-based diners will, I know, give a round of applause to Mike Blumenthal, who spotted this nifty new set of designations.

Mike recommends that restaurants that aren’t 100% vegetarian should especially invest in uploading lots of entree photos and labeling them in Google Maps in hopes that they will enjoy the little leaf icon and the “serves vegetarian dishes” justification.

Barry Schwartz recalls seeing the green leaf on eco-certified hotels, but it’s a fantastic new addition on Google’s part for restaurants. Fun fact: according to some survey data, there are about 10 million vegetarians in the US and another million vegans (these stats seem low, but then, I live in California!). Meanwhile, many omnivores seek out plant-based options for health or personal preference, so there is an ample opportunity to bring everybody to the table, and labels like these from Google make searching for qualifying restaurants a bit easier.

13. Speaking of that, have you spotted a listicle justification?

On the same day that I spotted this interesting snippet about a restaurant in Cleveland making a 25 most-photographed list on Yelp, my friend Claire Carlile was tweeting a similar example (which she dubbed a “listicle justification” from Wales about the 28 best places to eat in the summer:

Then, Stan Kolev pointed out how these lists are showing up in the Google Maps app and suggested looking up something like “sushi NYC” in Maps to see just how many of these are appearing now:

As Barry Schwartz wrote, some local SEOs feel they’ve seen this before, and others have not. My guess is that Google may have recently dialed up their prevalence. They tend to come from listicle articles like this one, making it a good gain for your local business if you get mentioned in such resources.

14. Left nav for local

Speaking of things that have become newly prominent, Google has been testing this left nav treatment in the organic SERPs for over a year, but this quarter, it began appearing for tons of local-intent searches, with the maps pin icon and “Nearby” filter label.

I wrote an extensive piece on this in November here at Moz, asking, Is the Nearby Filter Nav Actually Making Google’s SERPs More Local? A month later, I still don’t have a conclusive answer to that question because, in the examples I’ve looked at, neither the organic SERPs nor the proliferation of product blocks seems substantially more local. My best guess is that this filter is meant to localize the product blocks like these:

But, likely as a result of Google not having much information about the inventory of diverse local businesses in many towns, I’m seeing product blocks dominated by a single big brand. That’s not great for two reasons:

1. While there is a Target near the city centroid in my city of search, it doesn’t actually stock some of the products being shown. Items I investigated would have required driving 60+ miles to the nearest location that actually stocked them. So, that’s certainly not “Nearby.”

2. Google’s lack of info about the inventory of truly nearby local SMBs is enabling just a few big brands to dominate these results, creating a false picture of the diversity of shopping options that actually exist in many towns and cities. This does nothing to strengthen the“buy local” narrative because most independents are left out. Google can’t feature inventory it doesn’t know about, and I’d so love to see them invest in 1:1 outreach to local SMBs to get them more engaged and create a more realistic mirror of towns and cities online.

15. Ride the photo/review/updates carousel!

Hats off to David Hills for spotting this amazing mashup and to Darren Shaw for suggesting what to do about it. It’s pretty amazing to see Google pairing photos with review snippets while also highlighting Google Updates (formerly a Google Posts) from the business in the same carousel.

Awesome new features on the Google Maps app! Get on this before your competition does.

1️⃣ The Google Maps app now displays photos with review text and a Place Topic in a prominent carousel at the top of the Profile. Interestingly, the pictures and the text snippets are often… pic.twitter.com/Plj7HQ2U5A

— Darren Shaw (@DarrenShaw_) November 20, 2023

Follow Darren’s advice for how to act on this: add plenty of photos to your GBP and keep writing those updates. I find carousels to be on the busy side, but they may be just what some of your customers like best.

16. New Organization Markup

Claire Carlile spotted, and Andy Simpson commented on this announcement from Google:

“Since 2013, Google has supported logo structured data, which recognizes two Organization fields: logo and url. Today we're expanding our support for organizational information by extracting additional administrative data such as name, address, contact information, and various business identifiers. You can continue to provide the logo and url fields to specify which image we use as your logo in Google search results. With this update, Google can make use of this markup in knowledge panels and other visual elements (such as attribution), which helps users more easily find your organization's details on Google Search.”

Do read the full announcement, and cross your fingers with me that Claire Carlile will write a big tutorial on this new opportunity because she’s so good at that!

And that’s it for Q4 2023 (although by the time we publish this, there could be ten new things at the rate Google is going as we close out the old year)! Wishing you great success in the year ahead, and please keep on visiting the Moz blog for this quarterly local search round-up.