Welcome back, this is John Locke for Lockedown SEO and today I want to talk about Google rolling out
their new experience for Google My Business editing. Previously, when you would go to
business.google.com to manage your Google My Business listing, you would see a screen with
your listing there, on the left hand side there would be a navigation menu, with your different
selections for editing info, for running an ad, for different things like that. But nowadays,
it appears that you are editing your Google My Business directly in the search results. So when
you type in business.google.com it'll take you to your business directly in the search results.
You'll see the search results, you'll see your business on the right hand side of the screen,
if you're on desktop. And you'll see, here is your business, here's the things that you can do,
to edit it. All those things that were on the left hand navigation are now directly in the search
results. Now, this is kind of frustrating for a lot of business owners who are not anticipating
this change. Google is calling this new layout the New Merchant Experience (NMX) in the Google
Business Profile (GBP). Basically if you want to edit a business, if you are in the email account,
the Gmail account, the Google account that has access to that, you would just search for that
business, and then it would show up, and you would be able to edit it. So, a few things to note about
this [change]. The insights to your photos is no longer available in this new experience.
Users are now called managers. If you are like me, someone who manages multiple different profiles,
there's no need to go into business.google.com -- you just search for it in a search,
and then you would be able to access it directly there. And posts are now called updates in the New
Merchant Experience part of the Google Business Profile. One of the things that you'll note too,
is when you go to access this in the search results pages, there will be a little three
dot menu, what we normally call--I think we call it a "kebab" menu--where it's the three dots.
There are more things that you can do that are hidden behind that menu, so be sure to
check that out. And some performance metrics have disappeared entirely. For example, how customers
search for your business--that insight has been removed entirely. Now, the reason why Google
made this change in most likelihood is--and if you hear that snoring-- that's my cat--but
the the reason why Google made these changes is they discovered that most people,
when they're trying to access their Google My Business, what they do is they search for their
business. They know that it's going to come up on the sidebar in search results, and they said,
why not let people access it directly from the search results? Because a lot of people
don't know to go to business.google.com -- it's really confusing, but the normal people out there,
the small businesses that only have the one business that they're managing,
that's how most people try and access it. S.o they said, let's just combine it and we'll make
it easier. So, this is a little frustrating for agencies in the short term, but I'm sure in the
long term we'll all figure it out and adapt to it. And it does not appear that there's a way
to switch back to the old dashboard. You are stuck with this. Right now, there is no going backwards,
this is a permanent change. But if you have questions, or if you have comments about this New
Merchant Experience, the new Google My Business, the new Google Business Profile experience,
go ahead and leave it down in the comments below. If you have another question about local SEO or
Google My Business, go ahead and leave that down in the comments below. We'll be sure to answer
that. And as always, if you're getting value from this channel, go ahead and subscribe, leave a
thumb up. Like I said, subscribe. It really helps it surface this channel more to other people,
and they can get help from it as well. That's all I have for now. Until next time, peace.