Recently, Google dropped the local carousel for hotels, restaurants and many other local businesses, but how will this effect local listings? This new design was created to provide Google users with a better search experience and offer more information.
When Google rolled out the Google Carousel in 2013, finding local business has been easier than ever—until now. When a user searched on Google for a steakhouse, the Google Carrousel would populate a variety of near by steakhouses or similar restaurants, as well as details about each one, such as reviews, photos, menus and more. Now, all of that has changed.
Late last week, the rollout of the new design has taken affect. The new design appears where the local listings/map are, just below the top AdWords results. Similar to the carousel, users will have the ability to click on the results, but this time users will land on a new business page similar to the look and feel of the Google Knowledge Graph.
Not only do the new business pages provide the basic information such as address, phone number, and hours of operation, but it provides users with search results pertaining to the restaurant they clicked on, like local listings.
The new design creates a simpler way to display the information users want to see. Google has made it more efficient for its users to gather information about local businesses. When searching for “steakhouse in St. Louis” the listings appeared and provided the top three restaurants that best matched the search.
Users are also able to filter through all of the results by rating, price and hours, which then shows other options for users to pick from.
While this new design promotes an more efficient way to find the local business information, it is currently only available for desktop searches. At this time, it has not been disclosed whether they will roll this feature out on mobile or not.
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