What's New in Local Search for February 2016

Once a month our in-house local expert, Mary Bowling, hands us her take on what's changed in the local search industry over the last 30 days. It started out as an in-house memo and has been upgraded to the lead post within our local search updates. Let's jump straight in and see "What's New in Local Search" for February 2016.

• Google pilots a program that pulls information into the local knowledge panels within the search result pages via the schema encoding on the brand website for multi location businesses. They recommend using JSON-LD to code the schema on the site and marking up everything. That should be a clue for all of us to figure out how to use JSON-LD on our websites.

• A carousel of medical providers appears in Bing results. Clicking on them leads to a page of results about that person. I haven't been able to get it in my search result pages for other types of practitioners, like attorneys and realtors, so it's probably a test to determine if people find it useful or not. It's interesting that the local pack shrinks down into a minimal display when the carousel appears at the top of the results. That pack includes business listings, not practitioner listings. If you market medical businesses, this is worth watching.