Google Guides: Year in Review & My Insights into the Platform

Let’s begin by looking into the “year in review”, all puns intended, for the Google Guides platform and my personal little contributions within it.

Google Guides: 2023 Contributions from Vilesilencer

Within 2023, at some point, I decided to dedicate some time to the Google Guides. As I view “creative writing” as a stress outlet, as well as photography, reviewing businesses whilst travelling has allowed me to follow both pursuits at the same time.

The image above has some interesting statistics and it provides some insight into how I particularly use the platform.

So we have:

1,144 Answers
49 Reviews
936 Photos
2 Places (added)
0 Ratings

Let’s tackle Photos first – it’s the easiest. We all take photos. However, when I choose to take photos whilst traveling, I am particularly taking them to document my visits to a business or tourist attraction. If the picture is poor, doesn’t represent that business fairly, or showcases a negative – I don’t put it online. Because I take a lot of photos, I’ve added nearly 1,000 to the platform this year alone. Seems like a lot, but if you’ve seen my photo reel, it’s a small selection.

The next contribution I want to detail is Reviews. It’s been an interesting change moving from Yelp to the Google Guides platform. I was a Yelp Elite at one point, many moons ago, and I have written more than 350 reviews for them – and the reviews are generally long, those aren’t just short “I liked it, you should go”. I story-told so 350 is a huge amount. However, this is where I’ve changed my process somewhat. On Yelp, I was a hard critic – I wanted to detail ALL my experiences, and only a small percentage of those were 5’s. In fact, even very good experiences I generally gave a 4, it had to be exceptional to get a 5. On Google Guides I chose to go down a different path. Due mainly to time constraints, and a change in perception after the last few years that we’ve all been through, I wanted to only share positive experiences, in part to reward the business for their hard work, and in part to only share the good stuff I’ve enjoyed. So whilst I make less reviews, I choose only to review businesses that I would give a 5. I made 49 reviews in 2023, and just recently went over the 100 mark! More on this below…

This dove-tails nicely into why I have exactly zero Ratings. I have never just rated a place without writing a review. I see no point. I think actually this should be removed from the platform as it lacks context. If a user gives a business a 1-star rating but provides no reasoning or context as to why, how can that help YOU when you come to consider that business… The same is true of a 5. If multiple people are just throwing out 5-star ratings, are they friends of the business? Are they owners of the business who feel silly complimenting themselves? So I avoid rating altogether. I feel that if I consider a business a 5-star then I should tell you exactly why that is.

The Places contribution comes into play when you “add a place to Google Maps”. I’ve only added 2 places, so this is small. Unless you own a place, are adding a new one on behalf of a client/friend/family or have amazingly discovered something that no one before you has – then you don’t need to add places to the map, so I use this rarely.

The Answers contribution is the final one, and this is also interesting because it doesn’t pertain to answering in the way that many might think. If someone asks a question to a business on the platform, and you answer it, that counts towards this contribution – however, the reason I have so many of these isn’t because I have done that. The Google Guides platform also asks many generic questions like: How much you spent on your visit? Is parking available? Does this business serve food? and if you answer these, they count towards the contribution. I’ve answered these in chunks from time to time, and that’s why I have so many over 2023.

How Important Are Reviews, Really?

This is something businesses really need to start thinking about. Whilst reviews have been around in many guises for a very long time, the existence of them for your business, especially at volume and frequency, can give strong indicators about what you are doing right and wrong with your business – including feedback that you can choose to adopt or ignore (that’s your takeaway). What you might not know though, is that potential customers tend to look at reviews as a last mile consideration before making a purchase from you, booking an appointment, visiting your website, or asking for directions to your store (to visit you in person). That’s your potential customer’s takeaway. So if you ignore reviews you could be missing out on potential customers.

With that in mind, my 100 reviews have now generated over 200,000 views on Google.

I’ve only just tipped over the 100 also. So, given these reviews are all quite recent you might expect that view count to go up considerably. I’ve also noticed that Google doesn’t display all your reviews. On some businesses there might be a [hold] on reviews. I suspect they do this when there is increased media or viral social stuff going on where spikes in reviews happen (positive or negative); I’ve also noticed where there are particularly negative dialogs (firstly from the reviewer; and then secondly from the business owner) that Google tends to restrict the reviews that show – as they may want to curb this sort of behaviour – which seems logical.

Why Did I Stop Using Yelp?

There’s 2 main reasons, which I’ve touched on in previous posts, and these are that:

The Google platform is more universal – when you put something on Google you have a far bigger audience. The bigger stage means that you can have more of an impact.
Yelp’s biggest USP no longer exists internationally – when Yelp shutdown the Community Managers program outside of the Americas, it took away their key differentiator and what drew me to the platform initially. It meant that they were just another review platform, with no incentive to stay loyal.

This graphic is from today – you can see the tiny amount of views my 376 reviews get on Yelp. A mere 437 in 90 days. On Google, my only 100 reviews have received 200K views – whilst that is a total amount, half of those reviews are from 2023, so we are talking magnitudes of 100K views for 12 months versus the miniscule 1,600 that Yelp can actually offer.

You could argue that the Yelp reviews get more engagement. Per viewer they absolutely do. But by sheer weight of volume they lose this battle – and that’s one of the reasons I’ve abandoned the platform. Not only do I not review on it or add photos, I don’t use it anymore either. I stopped altogether more than a few years ago now.