Last Tuesday, February 2nd, was a big news day for Amazon. Everyone read the headlines that Bezos was moving on up to Chairman of the Board in the 3rd quarter. The stock market responded positively and the news of the change and the story gained widespread traction with Google showing 44,500,000 articles on the topic: …

Downdated 6/22: This was reported by Barry Schwartz as first spotted in November by Velentin Pletzer and seen off and on in June by tl;dr Marketing. The current widespread visibility implies that this might be the rollout and not a test. Over the weekend, my mobile devices are all seeing a new 3-pack with a carousel display …

In case you didn’t get enough of me this week here on my blog, you can overindulge in local  until you puke at these other fine publications: Ductape Marketing: How to Get Found Using Ever-Changing Local SEO Tactics I have a fun conversation about Local with one of my favorite marketers, John Jantsch. We talk …

Apple started shipping iOS10 with a new version of iMessage yesterday to the installed base of iPhone users. Welcome to the new era of conversation commerce for local. And with the new version of iMessage comes an App store and the ability for third parties to integrate directly into the messaging flow. When initially announced …

The LocalU Advanced Super Early Bird Pricing ($599 or $549 for 3 or more) goes up $100 at the end of day 9/8/2016.  So order today. To give you a sense of the kind of speakers and topics we will be dealing with we are interviewing some of the speakers.  In this second interview of …

Since early August with the roll out of Critic Reviews and Top 10 Lists and with the recent rollout of Reviews from the web and a significant review snippet display upgrade, Google has been on a rich snippet tear. Here are some my thoughts, big and small, about these changes. Do you see these changes …

In addition to the release of Reviews from the web and new review rich snippet guidelines (again), Google has simultaneously updated the display of mobile organic review rich snippets with more space and additional pricing details. H/T to Aaron Weiche, the CMO at GetFivestars. Although Jared McKiernan of ParkWhiz asks some interesting questions:

Update: I just heard from David Deering about the plug-in’s use of Schema. Firstly the schema is not done correctly. More importantly however (which I suspected but didn’t investigate as I thought the schema was reserved for the paid version… mea culpa) marking up reviews and ratings that were created on another site actually goes against …

Local U Advanced is returning to Seattle on June 10th with an all new curriculum for 2014. When asked what attendees liked best about our just completed Local U Advanced in Philadelphia here is what a few of them said: How intimate the group is and the ability to talk to the presenters before, during and after presentations. All …

Update: 3/3/14: Only 11 seats left. There are only 9 days left until our next Local U Advanced, just outside of Philadelphia, at the DoubleTree by Hilton in King of Prussia, Pa. This year we have limited the total ticket sales (including sponsor seating) to just 65 folks. As of yesterday afternoon there were only …