Google Ads now shows three ads in Local Services Ads (LSA) on both mobile and desktop searches. This was noticed by many experts and shared screenshots on Twitter.
Recall that earlier advertising of this format, placed at the top of the search results and containing ratings, as well as Google Guaranteed/Screened icons, was represented by only two results under the search line. Now there are three of them, perhaps because the number of click-through results has also increased, says SearchEngines.
In addition, many SEOs suspect that the LSA contains a large number of fake reviews pulled from Google Business Profiles.
For example, one optimizer reported that while looking for a lawyer in Fresno, he came across the fact that out of more than 100 LSA results provided by Google, only a few were really useful. Most of the results are from the site of the same company, with the same address and phone number. In some results, it was not possible to verify the correctness of the physical address, but at the same time, all the results without exception have a 5-star rating. How can this output format be useful to search users?
In response, Len Raleigh spoke out, saying that reviews in advertising for local Google services are 75-80% spam. He also found that when searching for local services, 25-50% of the results contained information about one company from Newport Beach:
“They have the faces of 17 specialists, various DBAs and hundreds of LSAs. I have provided detailed information about this to Google employees, but they refuse to do anything about it.”
NIX Solutions notes that the “Google Guarantee” badge is awarded to those companies that have been verified and qualified for the Local Services Ads service. The SEO community is wondering if Google doesn’t actually do any validation of advertised companies and services, is that not cheating consumers and breaking the law?