Google recent­ly rolled out the abil­i­ty to book appoint­ments at US salons and spas direct­ly with­in search results and Google Maps.

Whether it expands fur­ther remains to be seen, but, in the mean­time, it offers inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for both Google and small busi­ness­es.

Accord­ing to Tom LaVec­chia, pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm X Fac­tor Media, the move marks Google beef­ing up its own local pres­ence, which has been some­what weak so far.

And, for Mar­cus Miller, head of SEO and PPC at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm Bowler Hat, the main take­away is Google allow­ing con­sumers to do more with­in search results.

“Google by its very nature is always send­ing peo­ple away from the search engine, con­trary to Face­book or [oth­er social plat­forms] where users spend far more actu­al time,” Miller said. “By weav­ing more func­tion­al­i­ty into the search results, local or oth­er­wise, they can keep peo­ple on the search engine longer and have more [of a] chance to get peo­ple to click ads.”

For his part, David Erick­son, vice pres­i­dent of online mar­ket­ing at Kar­wos­ki & Courage Pub­lic Rela­tions, agreed Google is insert­ing itself into the cus­tomer jour­ney at a point where said con­sumer might break away, which could be ben­e­fi­cial for small busi­ness­es that don’t already have the abil­i­ty to book appoint­ments on their web­sites. How­ev­er, he not­ed the com­pa­nies that want to con­trol the book­ing expe­ri­ence and gath­er data on their web­sites could see this as an unwant­ed intru­sion.

Miller said he also wouldn’t be sur­prised to see this ini­tial­ly free fea­ture even­tu­al­ly become paid.

Per Miller, this means it’s even more impor­tant than ever that small busi­ness­es stay abreast of what is hap­pen­ing in local search so they can ben­e­fit from rel­e­vant fea­tures “and make sure they are ear­ly movers to ben­e­fit before the paid ele­ments even­tu­al­ly creep in”.

Erick­son also advised small busi­ness­es imple­ment a sys­tem to solic­it feed­back of cus­tomer reviews as “star rat­ings and cus­tomer reviews with­in the search results and the knowl­edge pan­el will play a huge role in whether or not a poten­tial cus­tomer decides to use the book­ing fea­ture”.

This could also be a sign that, like jobs and trav­el, Google is con­sid­er­ing a move into online book­ing and appoint­ment ser­vices.

“With Gmail and Google Cal­en­dar, the fun­da­men­tal infra­struc­ture is there for Google to enter that mar­ket,” Erick­son added.