Google My Business has been in the news a fair amount lately with new features and upgrades. This includes a new feature to promote positive reviews and the ability to add short names and URL’s to a listing. All these new features makes sense, with the increasing prominence of localised search and customers looking for products and services in their immediate area within a few clicks.

Now, Google is sending out a survey to gauge people’s interest in paying for a Premium Google My Business listing.

Currently businesses are able to update their Google My Business listing and in exchange, Google provides searches with localised search results. In a new survey Google asks local businesses a number of questions about how much they would be prepared to pay for Google My Business Features. Many of these features are already free and asking business to now pay between $10 and $70 a month requires room within their marketing budget.

Many businesses rely on Google My Business as an important marketing tool so perhaps Google thinks they can just charge for this feature and people will pay. Ultimately it depends on your business and how reliant you are on Google My Business as a marketing tool.

Why Should You Care?

If you use Google My Business to generate leads and phone calls, monitor and reply to reviews and upload posts – you should pay attention. If Google is going to start charging for features which are already free how would this affect your decision to pay for a package? There are, however, a number of new features set to roll out:

• Google customer support
• “Book” button on your business profile
• Promote your “Book” button
• Verified reviews
• Promoted map pin
• Call reports & recordings
• Verified bookings
• Automated message responses
• Automated response for reviews
• Google search results placement
• Get leads from competitor profiles
• Background check
• Instant quote
• Request quote
• Offers
• Featured review
• Google Guarantee
• Remove ads from your business profile
• Verified licenses
• Video on your business profile

It would be worthwhile taking the survey to find out if these new features would benefit your business and how the additional cost would affect your decision to upgrade. Google typically charges for advertising and not to simply be listed in the search results. We think if this premium service rolls out it could change this model and compromise Google’s internal ethics.

Have you taken the survey? What do you think about these premium features and the additional cost involved? We would love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: Google My Business