Google launches Years in Business in Search

[Lluc]

Hi! After some testing, Google has announced that it will display the "opening date" of eligible businesses in Search. Does anyone know which are the eligible businesses?

Launch: Years in business - Google My Business Help

February 9, 2021Add an opening date to your Business Profile to tell customers when your business first opened, or will open, at its address. Learn how to add an opening date. While the “Opening da

support.google.com

 

[djbaxter]

Some information from Barry Schwartz (Rusty Brick):

Google officially displays years in business in local pack

After several months of testing, Google has officially launched this new label that shows how many years your business has been in operation.

searchengineland.com

Here is a screen shot of my business, RustyBrick, showing the 25+ years in business label in a local pack listing within the Google Search results:

How do you get this label. Google said you need to provide the open date in your Google My Business profile. Google explained you can do this by logging into your Google My Business account, clicking on your location, then selecting the “info” option from the menu and then click on “add opening date.”

More history. It seems Google started testing this back in September 2020 and then started to roll this out more broadly in November 2020. And now, in February 2021, Google officially announced this as a feature.

Prior to that, Google tested a feature to communicate to customers labeling your future open date for new businesses.

Why we care. Sometimes showing that your business has been in operation for 5 or more years can help searchers trust your business more. So if your business has been around for some time, adding the open date can help encourage a searcher to click on your listing and potentially call or visit your location, hopefully ultimately leading to a sale.

Google wrote you can “add an opening date to your Business Profile to tell customers when your business first opened, or will open, at its address.”

However, I'm not seeing anywhere to add it on my GMB here in Canada (using the desktop version).

Added: I just checked on the GMB mobile app (iPhone) and I don't see anywhere to add it there either.

 

[djbaxter]

I missed this in the post cited above:

Google quietly announced that the “years in business” label is now live for businesses that want to display how many years they are in business within the Google Search local pack.

I'm a SAB listing and definitely not in the local pack so I would guess that's one of the criteria?

 

[Lluc]

Thank you @djbaxter. The "opening date" field has been available for some time in the GMB dashboard, at least a couple of years for the businesses we manage (hotels, restaurants, spas, ...) but Google never displayed this information anywhere. They have now confirmed that they will be displaying this data in Search, which is what Barry refers to in the screenshot- "25 years in business".
In Google's announcement, it just mentions that it will be shown for "eligible" businesses and I can't find anywhere the list of the eligible businesses and was wondering if anyone had any further info.
I've been checking hotels and so far I have not seen it displayed on desktop...

This is where the field is in the GMB dashboard.