What's New in Local Search for July 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. Let's jump straight in and see "What's New in Local Search" for July 2016.

• Google offers small businesses a free professionally-made video if they spend $150 promoting it on YouTube as an ad for their business. So essentially, they are offering you a video ad for $150.

• Reviews from select 3rd party sites appear on hotel listings on Google as Reviews from the web – again. We've seen this come and go over the years, but this time it appears that only reviews from particular sites are shown and they are not necessarily the ones you'd expect to see. Trip Advisor reviews, for example, are not included.

• Bing enables business listing verification by answering online questions about your business. The questions and answers are taken from Dun & Bradstreet information. I'm not sure about the opportunity this may present for spammers. Read more here.

• Google beta tests a new Trips app that quickly moves users away from search and into content curated by Google.

• “Google invites image spam and pisses off business owners once again," is how this post from Mike Blumenthal begins. Read this to understand why photos of something other than your business may appear as being associated with your business and what you can try to do about it.

• Yelp's SVP of business development, Chad Richard, gives us his vision of what's in store for local businesses. He says,

  My team and I work to be an interface with the rest of the industry to Yelp — whether it...