Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Written By Mike Blumenthal
Who is Winning the Apple vs. Google iPhone Driving Directions Battle? Too Close to Call
Yesterday I published the first question of my driving direction survey showing an extremely fragmented market. It is a category led by Google but one that is fragmented and, after a long period of calm, is once again becoming heated. Apple, with the release of their own mapping product in September, has quickly garnered market …
Driving Directions Survey- A Fragmented But Important Market
Introduction: When we think of driving directions, we often think that Google’s omnipresent role in the world of Maps indicates that they dominate the market for directions. When Google surpassed Mapquest and Yahoo in desktop mapping in 2009, it seemed that it was game over. But the current reality of driving directions seems to …
Why I love LocalU and Why You Should Come to LocalU Advanced Next Weekend
I love LocalU. Traveling around the country and interacting with small businesses and marketing agencies has been a blast for a number of reasons. Many of my reasons for enjoying the time spent giving these seminars should be enough reason for you to attend as well. I get to meet up with the likes of …
New Report a Problem Interface to MapMaker Rolled out in the US & France
Two weeks ago in Canada, Google rolled out an Easier MapMaker Interface that took community edits made via the Report a Problem link on a G+ listing and integrated the input directly with MapMaker. That interface has now rolled out to the US. It does not appear that this interface has rolled out in England or Germany …
Google Updates Mobile Pack Display
Google might have updated the mobile local Pack display a while ago, who knows, but it seems to me a fairly recent change. The change makes for a more modern, cleaner business listing display. The font size of the business name is larger and the buttons are subtler and now incude an icon for the …
Google+ Local: Moving Locations? New Procedure
The way that Google has been encouraging SMBs to move to a new location has long been a kludge. Last night Google announced a somewhat more intuitive procedure although it still has a touch of kludge about it. From the forum post by Jade: Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving …
Google+ Local Quality Guideline Update Allows for Multiple Departments
Google has just rolled out an update to the local business listing guidelines that once again allow for support of individual departments within hospitals, universities, local governments AND businesses as long as they have unique phone numbers and a unique forward facing presence. In other words the emergency room no longer needs to be listed …
An Easier MapMaker Interface
In a recent comment Jeffrey Manger noted that “FYI the Mapmaker interface totally blows. What a confusing, ineffective, waste of my time. Maybe there is written instructions in a booklet somewhere on how to actually use this thing.” I totally agree that the standard MapMaker interface is a total kludge. Only the most persistent and …
LocalU Advanced Coming to Baltimore March 8-9th
We just finished up a great LocalU in Austin and we are moving on to Baltimore. In addition to presenting a basic LocalU (use discount code MB2013) on the morning of March 8th we will also be offering our LocalU Advanced session. Starting the night of March 8th with a mixer and following up with a …
Guest Post: Dan Austin on Google Mapmaker Categories
Categories have been a mess in Google Map Maker for years, as well. GMM Issue Tracker allows you to add categories for potential inclusion into GMM (which hopefully bleeds over into Local): http://goo.gl/OT3VO and star for the ones you like the most. Unfortunately, GMM, like so many other ‘community’ initiatives they’ve sponsored, largely ignores the …
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