SEO News You Can Use: Small Business Holiday Hub – Happy Holidays! Love, Google

Google has created a new small business holiday hub ahead of the festive season. With 2020 having dealt all small businesses a raw deal, this feels like a helping hand from Google in line with the spirit of giving. The holiday hub is packed with resources for business owners or marketers to promote their brand and prepare for what should (hopefully) be the year’s busiest shopping season.

After such a tumultuous year for business in general, business owners no doubt hope the festive season will help them make up for the major losses experienced during the shutdowns.

Many reports state that, in an effort to repair the economy, consumers are making a conscious effort to support local businesses. In a Think With Google article that unpacks the Google 2020 Retail Guide, it’s reported this festive season will see up to 66 percent of consumers looking to their small business owner neighbors for their holiday shopping needs. 

So now is the time to take what little budget is left and make some smart marketing decisions. And exploiting Google’s mini-site of holiday marketing resources is a great idea for all small business owners. The hub includes personalized recommendations for reaching consumers across Google’s Search, Shopping and Maps. 

Google has not held back this time. In the holiday hub, business owners and marketers are treated to lessons, live streams and how-to guides as well as two brand-new tools: Grow My Store, a customer experience analyzer, and Local Opportunity Finder, a tool to attract prospects to a company’s physical store as seen on its Google My Business (GMB) profile.

The hub includes marketing lessons in the form of short videos, which will help you with your strategy and putting the tools to good use. But wait, there’s more – on Wednesday, you can join a live stream for a one-hour demonstration on using Shopify with Google Merchant Center. You can sign up for the live stream here. 

More SEO News You Can Use

Yelp Announces 2 Initiatives Aimed at Fighting Racism in Local Business: Yelp, the review and ratings platform, has shown it’s not one to shy away from controversial subject matter, taking a strong stand in the fight against racism and advocating for diversity and inclusion. This week, Yelp announced a partnership with Open to All® to bring a new toolkit to local businesses that will help the companies create more inclusive operations. The second initiative Yelp announced is a new category of consumer alerts on business profile pages, which flags businesses that have been accused of racist behavior. This new Yelp alert will link to a news article detailing the incident and disable all other comments or reviews on the business’s profile. 

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer Says 43% of Search Queries Show Up in The PAA Box: Joshua Hardwick has published an in-depth piece on the People Also Ask (PAA) boxes. He gives insight into what this Google feature is, how to rank in PAA boxes and whether it’s actually worthwhile or if you should use this feature differently for SEO. This blog and the accompanying images give readers a great overview of what to do if this is on your optimization checklist. 

SEO Copywriting is More Than Keywords and Advertising Copy, According to Brian Dean: Dean has launched his new offering, and this one tackles SEO copywriting. This topic, it can be argued, has been discussed to death, but yet again Dean provides insights that will help any online brand, webmaster or content creator (and just about anyone else). He dives straight into how to find that sweet spot where the copy satisfies both the search engine and the target audience. It’s a worthwhile read and offers practical tips.

Google My Business Has Undergone Some Interesting Changes Recently: The first of the changes to the GMB tool is that business owners can now review more types of data regarding searches and the number of users who saw their profile in their performance reports. Secondly, the maximum size for video upload to your GMB profile has reduced from 100mbs to 75mbs. And lastly, Google has begun testing a new “call history” GMB feature, which helps business owners view and respond to missed calls from Search and Maps users. Currently, this feature is only available to selected businesses in the U.S.

It’s Been Revealed: Google is Giving the Police Data on Search Keywords to Help Identify Criminals: Your internet browsing history reveals a lot about you personally. However, the information trail you leave behind on the internet is considered sensitive information, and a warrant is needed if the police want to demand that information or have access to that data. However, an unsealed court document has revealed a glaring loophole in this system – criminal investigators can request Google reveals all searchers of a specific keyword. This means all users who searched the keyword will come under scrutiny in a process of elimination in an effort to find a suspect in a crime. This has come to light because of a recent case of arson in Florida.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.