Mike Blumenthal

Google My Business is testing a new, direct in the GMB App messaging capability. This was noted by Casey Bryan(from down under) on Twitter and confirmed by Steven Johns in the UK: This is new! I’ve just turned on messaging for my #GoogleMyBusiness listing 👩‍💻 pic.twitter.com/F2NLakoZRS — Casey Bryan (@CaseyABryan) December 7, 2018 I have …

Over the past year we  have seen the expansion of Google’s Reserve with Google call to action in all of their local products. It was never very clear to me which categories were eligible for Reserve with Google  or which might get it in the future. Joel Headley of PatientPop recently shared a link to …

Google Maps announced yesterday that searchers can now follow their favorite businesses and be alerted to offer and event Posts from that business.  I have long believed that Google Posts is a solid investment of a business’s time as Posts show up in a brand search, in the local finder and on keyword searches in …

This is my third post in the “who the f knows” series. Google has rarely been accused of great wordsmithing. But they have been accused of testing. In this case it appears that they are testing wordsmithing. Seeing the schedule/book/make an appointment CTA in the 3 pack motivated me, like any rational local searcher,  to …

I will be heading out on vacation on Friday so my production will be non existent for the next month or so. But if you haven’t heard enough of me for the past few days here are some other tidbits I worked on across the interwebs: Google and the On-SERP Experience: We’re Just Gettin’ Warmed …

This is my second post in the “who the f knows” series. And it relates to Google now showing the book or schedule button in the 3 pack. Or not showing as the case may be. When your boss comes and sees you and asks why are your booking buttons not showing you can either …

Transactions in Local Search via Google’s Reserve with Google tool have historically been limited to Knowledge Panel results. It appears that this transactional capabilities being expanded or will be expanded to include embedding calls to action directly into the Local 3-Pack search results. And given Google’s obvious expansion of the Reserve with Google we can …

Last week we learned of both a new Google My Business feature (in beta), ‘Add Product Collection’ and new GMB Insight’s data, ‘Branded Searches’. Both are interesting features individually but together, they are even more interesting. The GMB Branded searches, reported at SEL by Barry Schwartz, is apparently being rolled out. As noted in the …

Near Me searches have generally been on the uptick since the advent of the iPhone. But there have been the occasional downturns that were misinterpreted as a break in the trend. Now that we have more data, it appears that those downturns and subsequent peaks are seasonal lows and highs of a generally increasing  usage …

Last week, off and on, we started seeing the use of the image carousel in the mobile Local Finder.  This is a format that has long been present in the restaurant search results. The carousels have been seen off and on since then, showing up and then disappearing, only to show once again. When they …