Mike Blumenthal

In the EU and the US, Yelp has been actively seeking to get regulators to look at Google’s behaviors in local and to change the search results to stop favoring Google’s own local results. Yelp’s Luther Lowe noted: When a mother does a search for a pediatrician in Berlin, instead of being matched with rich …

Petra Kraft, a long time Local SEO and careful observer in the hospitality space, noticed an interesting test in Google Posts. She found a Knowledge Panel where Google was showing six posts using the primary image and a text over lay and the abilitly to see more via a right arrow. This is one of …

On June 13, Google Websites will be one year old. It was created to satisfy the needs of the very small business to have an easy, fast mobile website. In that time Google has managed to have had at least 2.2 million of the sites built. Given that Google also allows a business to purchase …

Update: Over the weekend many of these “A Google User Reviews” were removed from the corpus as well as the count. I just got this email from my favorite pet client, Barbara Oliver. She watches her reviews like a hawk and is very protective of them: I noticed today that I have 139 google reviews …

At the LSA 18 Conference in Chicago (at friggin’ 8 am*) Anita Yuen, from the Google My Business team, announced new features focusing on the small(ish) and bigger agency market. “GMB now delivers a tailored experience for agencies and platform partners”. 3 Key investments Updated API – coming Messaging API Improved Search APIs across location …

Yesterday at Streetlight Magazine during David Mihm’s and my conversation he noted: You’ve been banging the drum for the last 12-18 months that for most businesses, Google Is the New Homepage. The reality is most customers are coming into your business digitally with Google as the front door. But it feels like with all the new …

This was mentioned on twitter several weeks ago and reported on in France about a month ago (h/t Sergey Alakov). I missed the memo.  Google is now supporting restaurant reservations with the Book with Google Feature in the GMB. When initially introduced in October, it supported 12 booking programs across a range of verticals. OpenTable …

I have been looking at and thinking about Google Q & A great deal since its introduction. The feature reminds me of the movie, Dr. Strangelove and it’s subtitle: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Q & A is a lot like that. For those of you with many locations it’s …

Google has formally announced the availability of the new GMB feature to add a Service Menu to the local Knowledge Panel. It has recently been reported by  both Kevin Getch and Phil Rozek as visible in their client dashboards. From the announcement: Back in January we launched a new Menu editor for the food service industry. …

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