As its failed social platform heads into its final days, Google continues to add more ways for brands to control how their businesses appear in search results, including curated product detail listings, business posts, and now, a new section for special offers, right within your Google listing.
As you can see, the new 'offers' showcase will enable brands to add special deals into their Google results. Once a user clicks through to your Google Business profile - which they can do both from search and within Google Maps - they'll be able to scan through your current specials, which will help attract more customers - particularly, you would expect, via local search.
Businesses are able to add offers via the Google My Business app - as explained by Google:
"When creating a post in the Google My Business App, you’ll see an option to categorize it as an offer. From there, you can tailor the details to your specific needs. An offer can include a description of the promotion, a coupon code or any terms and conditions useful to your audience. You can surface up to 10 unique offers in the carousel, providing a list of choices."
As noted, the addition is the latest in a range of updates from Google which aim to provide more ways for businesses to control their Google listings, and utilize Google search as a business discovery tool. Many of these additions provide 'social-like' functions, including the capacity to post business updates, and now showcase offers - which makes sense. Rather than trying to compete with social platforms, Google looks to be shifting its focus towards its strengths, and capitalizing on where it can win out, as opposed to fending off competition.
For a great many businesses, Google search remains the key driver of website traffic, and is the key discovery tool for their services. As such, providing more ways for brands to refine and improve their search listings may be a better avenue for continued growth of Google's tools. Essentially, Google doesn't need to beat Facebook and other social platforms to maintain its lead in this respect, but it can improve its focus for similar queries through these new Google search tools.
Either way, it's a relevant consideration for your business - if you haven't downloaded the Google My Business app and updated your listings as yet, it's definitely worth doing so.