00:00Hey everyone, what's going on? Greg here again from Team Blast. So I'm noticing a trend with a
00:04lot of my local SEO clients is that rankings are either the same or better, but phone calls are
00:10way down from a year over year or even month over month basis. I'm going to show you why.
00:13So I'm using Microsoft Edge and I changed from a desktop view to a mobile view to show you what's
00:17happening. If you search for HVAC near me, you're going to get two local services ads at the very
00:22top. So you might even get three. This is actually where the majority of the clicks are going because
00:27they have a phone icon and a book and a gut quote and also reviews tab. Let's scroll down a little
00:32bit. Here's a Google ad at the very top. Again, you have a call button over here, but then you got
00:37the map pack. Now notice at the very top, there's a location ad at the very top. That's a Google ad.
00:42They have the call button there. They also have directions and website too, but look at Grasshopper,
00:47Highland, Heating, Home, and Cooling, and also my Jockeys account. These are the three organic map
00:53pack listings. Guess what? There's no phone icon there. So most users though, who come across this
00:59are going to either click on the ad at the very top because there's the call button. They're going
01:03to click on the Google search ad that has the call button right over here, or they might click on the
01:08location services ad. So from my perspective, Grasshopper is doing a great job because they
01:12have the Google local service ad. They have the traditional ad at the very top, and then they also
01:17have the organic map pack listing. So what happens though, if somebody clicks onto the Grasshopper
01:22Heating and Cooling page, you get to their traditional Google business profile page. They
01:28have the call button, directions, websites, share, the reviews, everything else like that. But now
01:32this is an additional click someone has to take now to get to the call section. So I'm sharing this
01:37say because for the accounts that I manage, I'm actually seeing this across the board where
01:41rankings are good or they're growing, but when we're looking at calls, we're saying, hey,
01:44calls are way down from like a month over month basis, even year over year. So I'm actually
01:49going to be recording more videos about this, of what I'm kind of doing next, but I wanted
01:52to create this as a PSA, just in case if you are looking at your analytics and you're not
01:57quite sure, you're saying, hey, our rankings look the same, but calls are way down. It's
02:02actually by intention. Google has removed the organic map pack phone call icon. You can only
02:08call directly from Google search if you have an ad running. So you may want to consider running
02:13some ads as well to make up that loss in call volume. But again, I'm going to create more
02:17videos about this of what I'm doing next for my clients. But anyway, let me know if you
02:21have any questions. Hopefully this isn't impacting your business too much, but if it is, feel free
02:25to drop a comment in the comment section and stay tuned for the next video.
Comments