Mike Blumenthal

Here are some articles that I have recently penned or collaborated on this past week: Google Q&A: Google’s Newest Knowledge Panel Feature That You Might Just Hate (or Love) – My recent research into the visibility and impact of Google’s Q & A feature and a plan to cope with it. Unpacking the Increasingly Complex Local …

Google has added (or has the intention to add) direct notifications of new questions appearing on the Knowledge Panel of local businesses. The option (pre-selected) is available in the settings preferences panel for any location. That being said, I have the settings on but I have yet to receive notifications of questions that are being …

I love local and I love LocalU Advanced. We have scheduled our next events for Austin. We will be doing an SMB event there to help fund Celia Bell’s training foundation on April 11th and on the night of the 11th and the day of the 12th we will be doing a full day Local …

I was alerted on Twitter by Marc Nashaat, a link builder in Toronto, about a new app from Google called Bulletin. From their page: Bulletin is an app for contributing hyperlocal stories about your community, for your community, right from your phone. Bulletin makes it effortless to put a spotlight on inspiring stories that aren’t …

I have previously noted naming abuses in the jewelry world around Toronto. Every once in a while I attempt to edit them for some rational outcome. Rational outcomes though are sorely not part of the current Google business name edit world. I rename, get approved, owner (or seo on their behalf) changes back. Rinse, Repeat. …

I have been heads down for the past several months exploring the ins and outs of Google Questions & Answers. Out of that came a ton of research* and finally some articles: At Local U, Mary Bowling and I discuss Q & A: Video Deep Dive: Google’s Q&A – Questions and Answers examined A three …

Google has announced an update to the Google My Business Website product to now integrate Google Posts into the website content. This is an obvious first move as Google moves Websites from a minimal viable product to something more full featured but still easy to use. The inclusion of Posts creates allows a business to …

Colan Nielson of Sterling Sky spotted the video option in the Google My Business dashboard starting to appear last week. Google has now officially announced that every dashboard now has the feature to see what videos consumers have uploaded and to upload your own. How it works: Videos will appear in the overview tab of …

In late October I reported of widespread name abuse in the jewelry industry near Toronto. I even flagged it on Google thinking that it was so very obvious that even with their collective spam fighting head stuck so deeply into a dark, posterior orifice they would be able to correctly identify it and remove it. …

2017 was the year for the Google My Business Center. There was a massive rollout of paid, free and improved products for Google Local this past year (Posts, Websites, Messaging,  Local Service ads, Q & A, Bookings, API 4.0) and a raft of updates to both the usability and functionality of the GMB. This came …