Instagram has launched a new map search feature to help users discover local businesses more easily. The new feature allows users to scroll around a map, browse popular locations, and explore local businesses. The map promotes a more immersive experience, where users can upload and view stories tagged in each location.
How the New Instagram Immersive Map WorksThe map, provided by Apple, has been around for some time, with photos available to view at each location. However, with this new update, users can explore areas and businesses throughout the map, finding prominent locations through the scroll search. Users can filter locations by restaurants, cafes, sights, hotels, parks and gardens, bars, and more. A search in San Francisco filtered to show only cafes. The new feature is now more of a discovery engine, where users can explore geographical areas by tapping on tagged locations on posts, stories, and videos. Once tapped, you’ll be shown a map of the area with a list of businesses within it to discover. The information you’ll see about each business location on this list includes:
Each location features three top images, which are collated from the second, third, and fourth most liked image tagged at the location. The most liked photo is used as the location’s profile photo, as well as the pin photo seen on the map. This suggests Instagram is adding authenticity to the experience, through real-time user-generated content, rather than relying on official logos or profile images used by each business. A list of businesses displayed when searching in San Francisco. For users with public profiles, stories and posts tagged at the location will show up for others to see on the interactive map. This looks like another way the platform is pushing for content creators to become discoverable through local area searches. You’ll notice top posts consist of many selfies and portraits from influencers. An interesting take here is that Instagram is the ultimate influencer platform, and it’s now making the most of it with this new maps feature, showcasing influencers at popular locations for more users to see. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram has recently said:
Clicking into each business location gives you the option to ‘see related guides’ which drives you to user-generated guides that feature the selected location. The benefit of this is that if users create a local guide that features you, your business is then more discoverable on the map. Locations also show a CTA button to ‘Contact’ or ‘Call’ the business if the business has this set up on their profile. This could mean an increase in clicks to call directly from Instagram, made by users looking to book with you from this in-map experience. The full view of a business seen when clicking into its location. You can also see a ‘View information’ CTA which shows the full business listing. The listing includes the website and phone number, a dropdown for daily opening hours, address, category, and price. It’s now even more essential to ensure your Instagram listing is kept up to date, based on the discoverability of your business through the new map update. What makes a business feature higher on the location list?According to Search Engine Journal, the only way to appear on the map is to have a professional account filled in with your contact information. Localogy has also found that the only trigger on the map is location relevance, alongside social signals like tags that inform relevance. We do not know if there are any other factors or algorithms to feature higher on the location list. What does this mean for Instagram and local businesses?Instagram’s new immersive map puts user-generated content, authenticity, and creators at the forefront of the map search experience. This update coincides with a recent discussion point from Google’s Senior Vice President, Prabhakar Raghavan about how “40% of younger users were conducting local searches on TikTok and Instagram instead of Google”. This data point suggests that users in this demographic are looking carefully at the authenticity of search results, with creators endorsing the location they tag in their content. It could also be that younger users trust user-generated content more than the Google algorithm. Greg Sterling at Near Media has suggested that this new map is a competitive local search feature, and “stands a chance of gaining meaningful user adoption“ based on it being built on existing user behavior. Users are very used to spending time on Instagram, so this new update won’t be anything completely new to them. What can local businesses do with this update?With this update, it’s really important for businesses in a variety of industries, particularly hospitality and tourism, to keep their Instagram business profiles up to date. If your business is ‘Instagrammable’ (i.e. your location, product, or service is curated to be visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing), then you could find many benefits with the map search. You could gravitate towards an influencer marketing and user-generated content strategy to encourage more people to share their experiences of your business on Instagram, and by doing so allow more people to discover it through map search. By boosting brand awareness in this way, there’s an opportunity for the immersive Instagram map to become a benefit to your business visibility and growth. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/k5anp8Q Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/
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In this new series, Local Search at Scale, Steady Demand’s Ben Fisher gets to the heart of the local SEO issues that matter to large brands and franchises with 100s of locations. To say that local SEO can be a bit complicated is putting it mildly, and that’s just when speaking about small businesses with a single location. When you’re talking about an enterprise-level organization with numerous locations (i.e. franchises) across numerous markets, it can quickly become a mess. For starters, before we dive into how to best approach local SEO as a large enterprise, let’s first briefly define what we mean when we talk about local SEO. Local SEO is a marketing strategy that has a singular goal—to help your business be more visible and rank higher in local Google searches. Any type of business that has a physical location or a particular service area (known as a Service Area Business, or SABs) can benefit greatly from a targeted, organic local SEO campaign. Seems fairly straightforward, right? Why then do so many large enterprises usually fail with their local SEO efforts? Let’s discuss, and move on to five tips that can help improve your campaigns. The Primary Challenges Large Enterprises FaceWhile large enterprises enjoy many advantages over their smaller counterparts (massive budgets, larger talent pool, etc.), their size can actually be a drawback when it comes to properly executing a local SEO strategy. Some of the main problems I have seen in my years of helping organizations both large and small with their local SEO are: 1. A lack of understanding of where their marketing dollars can be most impactful in terms of local SEOI mentioned the budget up above, and enterprises aren’t shy about flexing their financial muscles when it comes to large ad buys that run in every market in which they have a franchise. However, when it comes to a targeted local approach that needs to be carried out at the individual franchisee level (such as getting local owners/managers to regularly post content and upload new photos to their Google Business Profile, or GBP), there is often a fundamental disconnect. Because enterprises are typically used to larger spends (such as throwing a king’s ransom at a Google AdWords campaign) and because they are used to thinking in terms of hardline ROI (“we spend X amount of dollars and see Y amount of new business”), they often balk at spending on the individual level. They’d rather not “rock the boat” and instead keep it safe with the same old approach (which doesn’t move the needle at the local level). 2. A lack of communication between all involved parties at every location or branchOrganic, local SEO work takes just that—work. It’s not exactly brain surgery, but it does take real people doing real things, and being accountable for the process. In larger enterprises, this can prove to be a challenge. Oftentimes, a campaign can be as barren as a global marketing manager emailing all the franchisees out about a promotion or effort they should undertake that can help bring in new leads. Some actually do it, many don’t, and some probably don’t even read the email. Then, when the results are—unsurprisingly—not there, executives at the enterprise level will pass the buck off to the local managers and claim they’ve done everything they can. 3. Too many involved decision-makers can grind the approval process to a haltI mentioned above that one of the biggest benefits enterprises have over small businesses is often their massive pool of employees. There are bound to be talented and driven people who can (or at least should) work together to achieve stated goals. However, with this many people involved in the process, things invariably fall through the cracks. You have people who feel they are “too senior” to be doing things such as claiming local listings or hiring new vendors for the franchisees to work with. Conversely, you might have people who are new to the organization and are hesitant to jump in because they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes (or they simply haven’t been told what they should and shouldn’t be doing). Either way, nothing is approved and nothing gets done. This can be disastrous if the task at hand was something like making sure all the Google Business Profiles at every location were in compliance, as a suspended GBP can be a costly mistake. 4. The difficulty of deciding who should actually do the workThe situations listed above about employees and enterprises not being sure who is doing the work spill into a third situation. You might have a situation where there are a dozen or more “decision-makers” in a meeting, something is brought up that needs to be done (such as making sure each Google Business Profile for each franchise is in compliance), and everyone agrees that it’s important… but nobody volunteers to do it because they assume somebody else will (AKA – the Bystander Effect). As you can imagine (or are aware of personally if you’ve worked for a large company), this is a common occurrence. One of the best ways to mitigate this is having the enterprise control all of the marketing at the franchise level, including making small, yet critically important, updates to all the Google Business Profiles. This doesn’t totally solve the problem of slow decision-making processes and concerns about targeted local budget spending, but at least everything is happening in one place. 5. The difficulty of making sure the plan is executed across all locationsSome of the problems I’ve laid out above only get worse when an enterprise has hundreds of locations. Not only are there more people involved which increases the likelihood of tasks not getting done, but it also increases the scope of work (especially if the franchisor is in charge of local marketing efforts). Let’s take something as simple as responding to a review on the GBP page for each location. If we allow five minutes per response and have an average of five reviews a month (which is a very conservative estimate for some types of enterprises), that’s about a half-hour of work per month per location. If an enterprise has 200 locations, that quickly swells into 100 hours a month. That’s not an amount that can just be tossed to a single person or that can be assumed somebody else is tackling. Here is my recommendation for how to ameliorate this particular issue: first, enterprises must clearly define who is responsible for what tasks, when they should be completed, and how they should be carried out. They must also create documentation for these processes and include a way to track the tasks. They should state the desired results from the beginning so team members know how they are tracking, and there should be a budget in place to help with vendor spends and anything else. Top Five Local SEO Tips for EnterprisesIn my opinion, the following list contains the top five local SEO practices that will not only solve the problems laid out above but also help you reach your discoverability goals and start outperforming your competition. 1. What should be on the website for each individual locationFirst and foremost, every location should absolutely have a website. That isn’t up for debate. I won’t go into too much detail about the SEO strategy for each individual franchise site, but the following should be considered the bare minimum:
2. Managing Google Business Profile pages properlyI could spend all day telling you how critically important GBPs are for local SEO rankings… but instead of that, you could just take Google’s word for it. The bottom line is that enterprises must make an effort to ensure that the Google Business Profile for each and every franchise location is optimized, a regular stream of relevant content is posted, and that they are all continually monitored to ensure that no erroneous information is present. 3. Link BuildingLink building has long been a cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy, and it’s no different when it comes to the enterprise approach for local SEO. I’m not going to go over how to link build here (there are plenty of good guides on how to do that via a quick Google Search), but I will say that it’s not something you should ignore. Many enterprises make the mistake of skipping link building due to the sheer number of locations they have and the fear that all that time and effort won’t have an appreciable impact. While it’s unfortunately not a scalable undertaking, link building is critical to the success of any local campaign. 4. Citation ManagementSimilar to link building, citation management is something that has been known to SEO experts for quite some time, and is also something that enterprises should absolutely do for their franchise locations. The good news and notable difference is that there are tools available that make citation management scalable across your locations. Yext and Moz Local, for example, allow you to create, verify, and optimize listings for every location of your brand. They can help push citations, clean up duplicate data, adjust incorrect data, and defend the online presence for hundreds of franchises at once. 5. Soliciting and responding to Google ReviewsReviews have quickly become one of the most important metrics a potential customer uses when making a purchasing decision. In fact, according to BazaarVoice, 78% of online shoppers trust reviews more than recommendations or word-of-mouth from family and friends. That is an eye-opening statistic and perfectly illustrates why enterprises should encourage customers to leave reviews. But getting a high number of reviews is only half of the battle; you must also respond to them in a timely manner, and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Customers expect to see the occasional bad review from a brand, but how that brand responds to them is key. ConclusionWrapping up, the best way for enterprises to handle local SEO is to take a clear look at their organizational structure, identify some of the pain points (particularly when it comes to workflow), and make informed decisions on who should be doing what. Once you have people assigned to the critical jobs of citation management, Google Business Profile optimization, link building, and soliciting/responding to reviews, it’s also critical that you have implemented ways to track these tasks and measure performance against your goals. Once your team knows what to do, how to do it, who’s doing it, and where to track it, you should start to see a notable increase in your local SEO efforts. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/r1z3yPG Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Got a question about reviews? We’ve got you covered! Our next Local Search Clinic will take place on Wednesday, 20 July. Host Claire Carlile will be joined by Dani Owens (Pigzilla) and Crystal Horton to answer your burning questions on Online Reviews. RecordingResourcesvia BrightLocal https://ift.tt/Gpo0sVa Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Local link building is the backbone of any local SEO strategy. Your rankings depend on the quality of your link building campaign, your capability to identify backlink opportunities, and your ability to network your way into link providers’ hearts! But local link building is notoriously tricky and time-consuming. And, without the right tactics, it can prove pretty fruitless. It’s also very different from traditional link building and requires an altogether different approach. So, what can you do? Enroll in our brand new BrightLocal Academy course—How to Master Local Link Building— by the local SEO master himself, Greg Gifford. During the course, Greg will teach you:
Watch this video to find out more… Who is this course for?This course is a great fit for agency professionals and business owners who are new to local link building and want to learn more. Or for those who want to brush up on their skills and find a more efficient and successful process. How can I join?Whether you’re a BrightLocal customer or not, you can get access to this course. You can also be among the first to find out when new courses drop by enrolling for free. Here’s how… If you’re a BrightLocal customer, you can access the academy via your BrightLocal account. Simply log in, click ‘Learning Resources’ at the top of the screen and select ‘BrightLocal Academy’ from the dropdown menu. You’ll be taken straight to your BrightLocal Academy account page, where you can enroll in the ‘How to Master Local Link Building’ course. If you’re not a BrightLocal customer, you can join BrightLocal Academy for free here and follow the steps above to enroll in the course. Want to know more about BrightLocal Academy?Check out the official BrightLocal Academy FAQs here: We hope you find this fresh new course useful, and we can’t wait to hear how it’s helped you improve your local SEO reporting skills. If you have any questions of your own, feel free to get in touch with us or leave a comment below. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/aoXfN6s Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ |
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