Another Google Feature That Will Impact Small Businesses

Guess what. Google has made another move that could have a direct effect on local businesses. This one has the potential to be quite helpful or hurtful, depending on how popular it gets, and how good reviews for your business are (hint – deliver great products and customer service to steer these in the right direction).

Google has released a feature called "Near me Now", which can be accessed on the iPhone and Android devices.

"’Near me now’ was designed to address two user problems," explains Google’s Mobile team. "First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you’re standing right in front of a business or if it’s just a short walk away. For example, you may want to know what other customers think about a restaurant before you go inside (see quick video below) or what they have been raving about on the menu before you order. By selecting the ‘Explore right here’ option, you can find out more about a place ‘right here’ with just a few clicks."

"Second, we wanted to make searching for popular categories of nearby places really simple," the team adds. "Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don’t see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using ‘Near me now’. To search other categories of places not shown, ‘Browse more categories’ provides access to our local search product with more category choices."

This short clip shows how it works.

Some say the feature could put a signifcant dent in the market share of Yelp and other similar sites and apps. That’s not too hard to imagine, since the "Near me Now" link appears directly on the Google home page. This could be an increasingly significant factor for businesses, considering that smartphone usage continues to rapidly gain popularity. While the feature is currently only available in the US for the iPhone and Android devices, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch that this will be expanded to more devices and more countries in the near future.

Google reportedly tried to purchase Yelp recently, but that fell through. It didn’t take long for Google to rush out its own competition for that, and while a lot of people may be happy with Yelp and the other sites/apps they are already using, it’s going to be hard for frequent Google users to resist the ease of clicking that link that is right on the home page.

It should be noted that users have to let Google see their location to even see the feature, so the amount of people who do that will affect how much this gets used, but as smartphone adoption increases, the usage of the feature will probably grow with it.