Mike Blumenthal

You would hope that most customers would speak up and communicate the problems that they experienced. Unfortunately that’s not what happens. Most of them will just remain quiet, you never know of their problems or dissatisfaction and they stop doing business with you. In my third post in the Complaint series (soon I will be getting complaints about …

Join Mary Bowling, Ed Reese and myself as we discuss: What Parts of the Local Pack Will be Monetized? I think that as a local SEO, one of the things you have to keep your eye on is how much is going paid and preparing yourself and your clients for the fact that Facebook and Google …

As part of my ongoing series on the impact of complaints on a business I have published my second article in the series: Survey: 8 Things That Really Cause Consumers to Complain . Handling customer complaints is one of those areas where most local businesses drop the ball. Yet its an area that has disastrous …

I have just published my first of a number of articles (I am at 4 and counting) dealing with the question of customer complaints:  5 Good Things About Customer Complaints. These articles will cover ideas, processes and research to help you understand the whys and wherefores of complaints and how their successful resolution can really …

Lately, having had some terrible customer service experiences with some big brands, I have been thinking a lot about complaints and what they mean to the consumer and the business. Complaints are so very different from a bad review and the appropriate responses are different as well. And I know when I ran a bricks and …

Yesterday (first reported on Twitter by Craig Harkins, an SEO manager at InterContinental Hotels Group) Google switched virtually every hotel profile photo in their Hotel Local Pack results from an exterior to an interior shot. While Google ostensibly offers businesses the ability to set this profile photo for their own business, that appearance of “freedom” to a large …

One area of Local Search where Google has been active with regular improvements has been the Google My Business API. Google seems to have committed to a regular schedule of regular updates and along that line V 3.0 was introduced today. There are two main features that have been released in this update: Ability to …

Every year around this time I get my Superpages Yellow Pages book. And every year around this time I report,  one more time, that the print Yellow Pages are dying. This year is no exception. The total page count, contrary to last year’s aberrant small increase, continued to drop and the book now sports 84 total …

Sergey Alakov, a Toronto SEO, reported on Twitter seeing this Google test of a slimmed down local mobile Knowledge Panel on a branded search. The mobile search was Humberview Motorsports Mississauga: Here is what is currently seen for that search: