Mike Blumenthal

Google has expanded the hours during which they are now providing English language phone support through the Google My Business Help Center. Support is now offered from 1 AM – 5 PM PST, Monday – Friday. Previously support was offered from 6 AM to 5 PM PST. Obviously, this is one of the benefits of …

Google has moved My Business Phone support to India and, at least for now, expect your call times to take longer. I noticed the changes to Google Local Support today. I haven’t called them in a while so it is not clear exactly when the changes were implemented. 1- It seems that a fair bit …

Over the past several days, a number of Google “annoyances” have cropped up…. sometimes it is amazing where a company like Google chooses to put its head…. that I wanted to get off my chest. 1- Did you know that Google’s bulk upload, even though upgraded multiple times with a raft of new ownership, management …

Rarely do I have something nice to share about Yelp but this note from Justin Mosebach of YDOP Internet Marketing was a pleasant surprise: Just found this out for a client yesterday. Client is a health system with a bunch of locations. Yelp called me back (after I called support) and said that only in …

On Friday I detailed changes in the new Google My Business Guidelines for Representing your Business that were general in nature and applied to all businesses or pertained primarily to single location businesses. Google has also added a completely new section that applies to Chains, Brands and Departments within larger entities. In this Google is …

Google has completely rewritten their My Business guidelines and in doing so has provided both more rules and many more examples. The best way to think about the new document is to read the overview as a statement of their overal objectives and the sections below as providing more nuance and use case examples. At the …

Google has rolled out a major update to their My Business (ie Places) Guidelines. The new Guideline offers much more concrete examples and clarifies a number of situations particularly multi-practitioner listings and their naming. Some obvious highlights: Descriptors of any sort are NOT allowed Categories should be the more specific category and NOT the overarching, …

I wanted to circle back to the call tracking issues in local. In my previous post, I wrote a great deal about where it doesn’t work. I also have wanted to cover where and how it does work. It made sense to me to ask someone in the industry to put it together so I …

As many of you know I live in upstate NY about 70 miles due south of Buffalo. You may not know that I am flying home today from Denver after speaking at the Hospitality Marketing Conference. You also know that there has been a boatload of snow in Buffalo and that people have died. And …

Some thoughts & observations on the new [Hamburger] Pak from Google which for now, like the Carousel, is US only. 1-The local carousel is still in use and shows when you select a result delivered by “People also search for” in a 7-pack result. Will we soon see its demise as well? Currently Google shows …