Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
Yelp’s 2013 Results and the Headlines that Weren’t
Yelp announced their 2013 “earnings” last week. I am continually shocked by the rosy headlines and the lack of due diligence often present in the reporting. Some of the more egregious examples of uncritical coverage: Yelp Pushes Through The Controversies With Big Growth And A 5-Star Quarter Yelp shares jump 17.5% on solid Q4 results Management Says Yelp Is …
New Flow for Google Places/G+ Page Creation
Googler Jade announced in the forums that newly created Google Plus Pages for local will be visible immediately upon creation. This should make the process more obvious to new businesses claiming in the dashboard. Hey guys, A few changes to page creation are rolling out gradually today — If you’re creating a listing in the …
Oh Where is Washington, NC? How to Fix a Google Map Error
Egregious mapping errors occur a lot less these days on Google Maps. While roads are still being lost or misnamed in New Jersey, we have seen no lost towns and misplaced communities like we saw in 2009 and 2010. And truth be told the problem with roads in New Jersey may be just a reflection of …
Google Category Tool Updated – Third Party Categories Added
Updated 2/5/2014 With Google’s rollout of new international categories, we are in the process of updating the Google Category Tool. Thanks to those that have helped out; Mohammed Alami, Chris McCreery, Eduard de Boer & Courtney Rogers. I want to give a special hat tip to Keenan Glass who showed me how to gather categories in …
Local U Advanced Philadelphia Early Bird Discount Ending
I have already proclaimed how much I enjoy the format of the upcoming version of Local U Advanced. It is in the Valley Forge/Philadelphia area the night of March 7 and the day of March 8th. Besides our all new content, great food, drink and conversation, Wil Reynolds will be providing the keynote. He is …
Google Alerting Australian Dashboard Claimants via Emails
Last week Google started upgrading the Places dashboards in Australia. Last night (which was this morning in Australia) Google started sending out a notice to Australian Places Dashboard claimants. Several folks reported it in the forums (ht to Nyagoslav) with headlines like “Scam or not?”. Hello, Due to changes in Google Maps, we’d like to …
Google Dramatically Increases International Categories
Google’s categories for many international dashboards have been woefully inadequate. Fortunately Google has just announced a major increase in the number of categories available internationally. Based on merchant feedback, we’ve been working to improve business categories. One of the key areas we thought we could quickly improve is expanding the breadth of available categories globally. …
The Future of POS is the Future of Local Marketing
Amazon to Offer Kindle Checkout System to Physical Retailers was the headline in an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I have long thought that POS and other similar integrated services delivered via a combination of hardware, software and web was the key to cracking the holy grail of SMB marketing services. In The Future of …
Local Answer Box: A Work in Progress or TMI?
It’s always fun when Google releases new “answers” like the local Answer Box to see them going wrong. It shows the limits of the current technology and gives some idea how it works. Leave it to Phil Rozek to find an unusual example of it not working quite right and have it give an answer to …
Google Adds Dates to Hotel Local Carousel
Barry Schwartz reported on SEL this am that Google was now allowing dates of stay to be set directly on the carousel. When updated, Google updates the results for their hotel finder immediately below the ads. I know that I have covered this topic before but it is striking even on my fairly large display …
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