Want More Online Bookings? Meet the New Google Booking Button for Businesses

Want more online reservations or appointments? Learn about “booking buttons,” a new feature in Google My Business that helps you get more of what you want.

Google is doing more and more to turn your local listing into an extension of your main website.

This month, Google took things one step further. It integrated “booking buttons” with a list of scheduling partners, making the buttons much more widely available to local businesses.

These buttons were first rolled out to the fitness and beauty industries in 2016. The program was called Reserve with Google, and still goes by that name. Customers click a blue button to schedule their spa service or reserve a spot in a workout class—right from the business listing and usually in under a minute.

Eligible businesses can now add a booking button to their listing by logging into Google My Business, signing up for bookings, and choosing their existing booking provider. Once setup is complete, Google My Business will report the number of bookings and booking revenue over time.

As of this writing, not all local listings qualify for this new feature, including enterprise accounts. However, this feature will soon roll out across the U.S. and to more business categories and countries.

“Booking buttons can help your business stand out from the crowd. People can book an appointment in under a minute directly through your listing—and you make it easy for them to become customers. And you can quickly track how many bookings you get from your Google My Business dashboard.” – Google

So what? Google is where first impressions are made, clicks are won, and happy new customers are snagged for life. Break down barriers of entry for appointments, reservations, and bookings, and you make your business irresistible.

Every month local listings evolve more and more into an extension of a business’s website. This makes strategically optimized and accurate GMB listings incredibly important. While most businesses with a retail footprint have an 80% or less accuracy rate for store data, GPO’s Local Pages clients typically have 98% or higher. That’s good for Google, great for your customers.

We anticipate that any business accepting things like reservations, bookings, and appointments will eventually be able to add a button to their listing. In the meantime, take a look at the list of supported booking vendors to see if your partner is currently supported by Google: Booking Button Partners.