Mike Blumenthal

fWhat do these numbers have in common? 217-351-2072 618-344-2288 618-708-4055 800-388-9326 866-215-8062 866-216-8068 866-627-6475 866-627-6478 866-726-3116 866-938-2374 877-336-2150 888-399-4067 888-719-5954

Update 11/25/2014: With the help of CallRail, we have written a new, expanded and authoritative guide to Call Tracking for Local. The question of call tracking keeps coming up in local search. Should it be used? Why or why not? The answer is often posed in stark terms of either you should or you shouldn’t …

I frequently get the question of how a business in the burbs can compete in the adjoining major metro area. Obviously, one tactic is to do really, really well organically and appear above the local search results. As a tactic that is roughly akin to drawing to an inside straight in poker… not impossible but …

Several items of note. 1- Firstly Google has announced in the forums that the new Places for Business Dashboard is now available for NEW users in UK, Ireland. It is nice to see this staring to roll out internationally. That being said the rate of conversions of existing dashboards is not at all clear. None of mine …

Update 1:00 pm EST: Googler Jade has just confirmed that some changes of some sort are on the way. Here is their statement: We’ve seen some questions about the small update to local search user interface on Google (removal of “More results near…” link) —  Thanks for your feedback about the small update to the …

A couple of days ago I received this email from Miriam at SolasDesign and my first thought was: what rich Google irony: Hey Mike, I was doing a search in Google today for ‘google+ local error 500’ and one of the results Google returned was this page of your site: Google + Page ‘500 error …

Today, Google announce the closing of foreign language forums for Google Places as of May 13th. It is not clear if language specific support will be available via email. The announcements can be seen in these various forums: Spanish: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-es Portugese: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-pt Russian: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-ru German: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/places-de/AEah3vEAUlk Here is the Google translation of the Spanish language announcment: Important Announcement: We …

Update from Darren Shaw of Whitespark: You can still access Places through a URL parameter: “tbm=plcs”. Not sure how long that will last though. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicago%20pizza&tbm=plcs&near=chicago This came to me from Andy Kuiper of Calgary and Vancouver: the Places search menu option has been removed from Google. Google has been cleaning up and removing links …