Mike Blumenthal

When Google Questions & Answers came out last week, I reached out to Barbara Oliver Jewelry (who doesn’t have any street level presence in Williamsville, NY and is hidden on the third floor of an office building) and advised her on how to deal with the new product. She agreed that she needed to get …

But the fact that there appears to be a rhyme or reason. Or at least the beginnings of one. Google has the best image recognition technology of the major players and that seems to be finally impacting local results.  In this screen grab of the new Local Scroll Pack this use of image recognition to …

Google has started the rollout of “Short Names”; the ability of a business to create a custom, short URL that then can be used for easy access to their business profile on Google. Customers can enter the short name URL in the browser’s address bar, like “g.page/[yourcustomname]”, to go directly to your Business Profile. So …

When I helped start GatherUp (previously GetFiveStars), I did so with the idea that local businesses, small and big, deserved world class tools that helped them navigate and benefit from the world of reviews. And I also wanted to be sure that the agencies that helped them could leverage the more advanced features of these …

Google has confirmed that anonymous reviews have in fact been removed from public view. Their statement to me: “We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.” If you recall, on May 24th, I reported their disappearance with the article Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?. Given the obvious angst that many small …

Update: Over the weekend many of these “A Google User Reviews” were removed from the corpus as well as the count. I just got this email from my favorite pet client, Barbara Oliver. She watches her reviews like a hawk and is very protective of them: I noticed today that I have 139 google reviews …

Google is formally announcing the world wide availability of Google Posts today. The product allows a business to micro-blog directly to their Knowledge Panel result, create Posts of up to 300 words in length and include a photo. The Post can be further defined as an event with a date range or a call to …

It’s spring time and there is mania in the air…or at least there is for me.  I have written/created a few more pieces for those of you that can’t get enough of local. Here is my other writing from around the web: LocalU: Podcast: Last Week in Local April 24th, 2017 Joy Hawkins joins me for a …

The product that was originally called Podium and is often referred to as Posts, continues to be tested as a small business tool that allows a business owner to post directly to their branded search result. We saw the “Posts” like test in late January that included a call to action and posting on the right. Recently, …

Google announced in mid August that they would be expanding their test of the beta ‘direct to search’ posting for SMBs. Barbara Oliver Jewelry just received her entree into the beta so for the first time I can test the product and assess its value1 . And learn better what how it performs and what benefits accrue to Barbara when …