Mike Blumenthal

Join Mary bowling, Aaron Weiche and myself at LocalU.org as we discuss the past year and the major directions of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon in Local. What are the trends and how should you respond?     The Deep Dive Video Series is a weekly discussion of an important aspect of Local. They are …

Early today at Linda’s forum and the Local U forum it was reported that Google had rolled out a Google Trusted Verifier Program that allowed folks in the field to verify a business while on site, using an Android app. It now appears that the help files were released prematurely and they were all removed …

Google is looking for folks to test upcoming SMB products: The Google My Business and Ads teams are working on several new product features in 2016 to improve overall merchant/advertiser engagement and value. Before releasing these products/features to the general public, we want to beta test them with a group of trusted business testers who …

Google has confirmed that they are now allowing a business to directly edit their business information via the Knowledge Panel and the Local Finder on the desktop and mobile WITHOUT visiting the Google My Business Dashboard. Prya Chandra reported earlier today on G+ a new Knowledge Panel interface that allows direct editing of a local listing …

Imagine a world where multi location business no longer have to continually mess with the Google My Business bulk dashboard and could have a direct feed of their critical location data to the Knowledge Panel via their website with schema markup.  Apparently that world is right around the corner. Rohan Ayyar of E2M pointed out on …

Today Google is releasing of V2.0 of Google My Business API and has just updated their website with new information about the open API. The V1 was originally released in mid October to a limited audience and with a limited feature set. V2 is being opened up to anyone and comes with a number of new …

In this video discussion at the LocalU forum David Mihm, Mary Bowling and I look at how the role of Google Local at Google and where does it fit vis a vis Plus and search. In thinking about the role of Local at Google, going forward we look at a number of interesting recent developments as …

In this video discussion at LocalU , Mary Bowling and I look at how the Google Local Algorithm has changed and how that changes what a Local SEO needs to do to succeed. As a starting point we use an article that Casey Meraz wrote at Moz, called Stop Local SEO Tunnel Vision – Think Beyond the Basics.

With Google having removed the location setting option in search a number of tools and tactics have hit the market to allow searchers to continue to retrieve location based search for areas other than the one in which Google thinks they are located. Here are three that all seem to do the job one way …

Update: As of 12/13 Google has removed ~40 of these listings but somewhere on the order of 20 still remain. I have been in the local space, in one form or another, for almost 15 years. Ten of those focused on Google Local. It is rare that I am shocked by my discoveries much these …