Mike Blumenthal

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:

I reported earlier in the day that Google seemed to be rolling out a new Tag like attribute for the free hotel listings in the Local Pack. During the past week, as noted by Brian Barwig and Michael Wallace, Google has also been adding paid ads to the top of the Local Finder. Together they …

Remember back in 2010 when Google rolled out “Tags” to allow for paid enhancement of your local listing? Well, at least in the Hotel world, its deja vue all over again as these paid insertions into the free Local Pack seem to have made a comeback. The Local Pack which has been the last bastion of “free” placement …

QR Codes never took off in the US. It was an offline to online play that always required too many apps,  took too many steps, was too obtuse and ended up not solving any problems. I once used them to learn the history of the streets a small town in Hungary – the only time I …

Google appears to be  rolling out local gas prices to the mobile Local 3 Pack. The pricing is also visible on the Local Finder and the location Knowledge panel. Spotted last night by Dr Pete on the desktop and  Adam Humphreys of Making8  and reported this AM by Barry Schwartz it is visible to me on …

Update: 5:00 PM Eastern They are once again online The Google My Business guidelines, the bible for what is and isn’t acceptable behavior when listing a business, seem to have come up missing from the Google My Business Help Files. (H/T to Helmut Geissler, Google Maps and Google My Business Top Contributor). The page URL …