Mike Blumenthal

LocalU Advanced takes a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the bleeding edge of local search. Our upcoming LocalU Advanced is taking place the night of October 20th and the day October 21st. To give you a sense of the topics we will be covering we will be interviewing some of the speakers …

Google has confirmed that they are expanding the test of a “write directly to the search” results product first seen in January for presidential candidates and in the March time frame seen for small businesses. According to Google the test is expanding from “10’s of small businesses to thousands”. We should be seeing more and …

LocalU Advanced is my favorite conference of the year. And you probably get tired of me saying this but this will be one of the best ones yet. The agenda has been released and it is chock full of great speakers: – Darren Shaw will be talking enterprise citation campaigns – Cindy Krum will discuss digital marketing in the age of …

Google seems to be either testing or rotating in more aggressive of the Knowledge Panel on mobile to garner reviews and additional location details. I am awaiting Jeremy Stoppleman’s forthcoming hue and cry. Last week over the cours of the day I saw these three Knowledge Panel presentations for the same location. (These have probably …

Google is in the process of updating the Google My Business and My Business List (bulk) interfaces to create greater consistency of the user experience. Several weeks ago they launch a new navigation experience and today they are updating the Info Panel. My sense is that there is more to come. (h/t to Joy Hawkins and …

Google announced the inclusion of expert opinions and top 10 list data into local search results. For now its appearing on restaurants but I assume that it can and will show more widely as Google figures out how to assign these sorts of results to other entities. These results are currently on mobile browsers and …

There have been an increasing number of reports (H/T Michael Wallace) of a horizontal Local One Box showing at the top of the search results as opposed to the side. There have been sporadic reports of the search results being shown as cards. Rasmus Himmelstrup, an SEO Analyst at Resolution Media, sent along an example of …

Frank Motola of Brandastic shared with me another recent example of Google’s test of a horizontal Local One Box that sits prominently at the top of the serps rather than to the side. This test has been reported for several weeks although I have not yet seen it in the wild. It would be one more …

The business description that Google has been asking businesses to create forever and that has not been seen anyplace for about half that long has finally been removed from Google MyBusiness. (Thanks to Dan Leibson of Local SEO Guide for pointing this out). It is soon to be “replaced” with “attributes” that offer more granular characteristics …

The Houston lawyer who decided that he needed to show a reviewer that they “need to learn the consequences of their actions,”  for a bad review must not have gotten the message that suing customers over online reviews is a terrible idea. The act is usually dumb* and the consequences almost always counter to the interests of the …