Recently Google sent out surveys to selected local businesses to find out if they would be interested in paying for Google My Business services that they’re current already getting at no cost.
If you’re not aware of what Google My Business is, it’s a free service that provides you a listing on Google Maps and will often appear for service related searches in the organic search results.
For those businesses that know how to use SEO services to rank their GMB listing, it’s been a consistent source of leads for quite a while now. That being said, the 1st page of the search results has been gradually moving towards displaying paid listings predominantly for a while now.
If you’re ranking in 1st position for organic search queries, your result is usually in position 3-7 on the page after the paid listings from Google Ads and the Google My Business Map 3 pack. This means the user needs to scroll past several options before they get to your organic search result.
The survey was asking about specific features that businesses would be willing to pay for and at what price point they’d be interested. Of course no-one except Google knows the plan, but in my opinion, they’re going to move towards a pay to play Google My Business service at some point.
How will this affect your business?
