Episode 38: Interview with Mike Blumenthal

This OMReport Andre interviewed Mike Blumenthal, or ‘Professor Maps’, the most wellknown expert of Local Search in North America. Mike is the founder of the Local Search expert blog Understanding Google Maps & Local Search and is writing for various other SEO resources like Search Engine Land. He is also a regular speaker on national and international conferences.

Andre Alpar: Alright. So, today’s interview is with Mike Blumenthal, today’s guru in anything Local in Search. Can you please introduce yourself, Mike?

Mike Blumenthal: Sure, my name’s Mike Blumenthal.

Andre Alpar: (laughs) Okay, so could you tell me how you became what you are? What kind of problems did you have in order to, you know, dig so deep into the topic that you kind of can’t get out of it anymore?

Mike Blumenthal: So, I grew up in retail, and in 2001 – we had a family business that had been open for 50 years – and in 2001 we closed it due to competitive pressures. And from that, I moved into web development. And early on, I recognized that the problems of a retail establishment and the problems of a website were much the same. When Google finally brought out Places and Local and merged the two in 2005 I had an epiphany. I was able to throw away 9 YellowPage books that I needed to market into my area and I did all my market prospecting through Google. I realized that everyone was going that way. That was in 2005. In 2006 when blogging was just getting started I was very embarrassed about the idea of writing about me, but nobody was writing about Local, and I couldn’t understand why, because it was clear to me: Local is where it’s at. We’re Local all the time, right? So I started interacting with Matt McGee and Bill Slosky, then a little bit with Dave Mihn and Will Scott, and started writing about my questions and collectively we came up with some of those answers. And that’s really my history, is that there’s a lot of questions about Local – how does it work, why does it work? Who should use it, who shouldn’t, and the questions are almost infinite. So it’s been a huge career shift for me, and I didn’t get my first local business outta my blog for almost 5 years. I wrote almost every day for almost 5 years and one day someone called me up and said they wanted to hire me! And I thought “Woah!”

Andre Alpar: “What do I do now?”

Mike Blumenthal: Right. So I started a small, Local SEO consulting practice and from there, you know, in partnership with David Mim and Mary Bowling and most of them we started Local You training seminars and we just rolled out the Local Inform. We can get any Local question answered by 12 or 15 of the brightest people in Local and I just – for the first time ever – built a software platform around reviews with Don Campbell called “Get 5 Stars”. So that’s what I’m up to. Right now I’ve got 4 jobs: Blogging, Consulting, Local U, and Get 5 Stars.

Andre Alpar: You can’t take them apart anymore, they’re so interweaved?

Mike Blumenthal: Well, I’m hoping to take them apart.

Andre Alpar: Oh, you do? So which one do you wanna focus on?

Mike Blumenthal: Well, first I want more time so I can write more regularly. And secondly, I’m hoping that Local U and Get 5 Stars will allow me to spend a little bit less time in the trenches of consulting, right? When you’re a single-ops person, the only one running the business and there’s no one else to give the job to, and you’re basically satisfying everybody and that takes a lot of time. And so I’m hoping to sort-of cut back a little bit on the consulting side so I can spend more time doing the things I really love – Local!

Andre Alpar: Right. So I think it was quite natural that there was this gap, because historically SEO came more from the enterprise kind-of corner of the world where people were able to spend a couple thousand per month for SEO and then the local businesses, they’re probably, you know, they’re probably willing to afford a couple hundred per month. So in that range, there was probably a limited number of things that you could do. And then with maps that changed, and then suddenly there is no meaningful things that you could do. And I think that the area that you’re active in is kind of exploding. I mean, the tool that you’re building is not the only one. It’s kind of like – it seems that the market has flooded since last year with tools that will manage your reviews and your local entries and the different directories. What do you think of that kind of explosion of tools for the local area?

Mike Blumenthal: Well, let’s see. There are some problem areas that need to be solved, like in Local Map we’re just seeing some solutions in the United States: Mars Local, Yext, and then a new product from Milestone called Neptune –

Andre Alpar: – I saw, like 3 others advertised here or there –

Mike Blumenthal: – and yet not any of them have quite captured everything that you need to do to clean NAP across the ecosystem, right?

Andre Alpar: Can you explain NAP a little bit for everybody?

Mike Blumenthal: Oh, sure. NAP, well Google, assembles their listings algorithmically, right? They’ve assembled a hundred, hundred twenty million businesses around the world. They buy a list from the various list providers, they scrape websites, they scrape directories. And then they assemble knowledge graph entities for that local business and put them out in local search. So it’s all done algorithmically. NAP is the glue, it’s Name Address Phone number, it’s the glue that holds this Google cluster together. And since they source their data from so many places, if your NAP is wrong, then you either reduce the strength of your listing at Google or worse, you could put multiple listings at Google or you send consumers to the wrong driving directions at Google or call the wrong phone number from the front page of Google. So it’s very important that you provide a consistent footprint of your business for Google to integrate into their data structure.

Andre Alpar: Yeah, and I mean that I think it’s quite understandable why Google is kind of using an app as a fallback to links because local businesses often don’t have too many links. So they have to find some kind of other solution, how to …

Mike Blumenthal: [interrupts] How to determine an entity in the real world.

Andre Alpar: Exactly. So they stated very much for SEO that it doesn’t make sense to go for citations or mentions as a proxy for what’s suggested as good. But for local businesses, it does make sense because you can’t rely on links. There’s just too little happening in the local space.

Mike Blumenthal: Right. And so they had found a number of proxies for prominence. Obviously there’s a website and there’s links to that website and like you said there are citations and mentions in news reports. There’s reviews and a new one that I’ve been exploring in depth is driving directions. Google has a very interesting patent on using driving directions as a proxy for prominence. And so by using driving directions that’s telling Google not just that a place gets more visits due to driving directions, but they tell Google when they get visits, what days of the week they get visits, what hours of the day they get visits and they tell Google about your own personal behaviour. Are you willing to travel 5 miles, are you willing to travel 50 miles? So not only is it a great ranking tool, it’s a great personalization tool and Google has written some whitepapers suggesting that they can mix and match driving directions with reviews as a prominence factor.

Andre Alpar: Wow. So that’s quite a resemblance to some more advanced SEOs what they think that basically analyzing traffic as a proxy is irrelevant for regular SEO. That would be kind of the real-world pendant.

Mike Blumenthal: Yes, absolutely.

Andre Alpar: So you think then for a local business it would make sense, then, to tell their customers ‘Please, when you’re coming to me use your Google navigation system and type in my address,’ Would you go that far already? Or you think it’s a thing we should keep an eye out for?

Mike Blumenthal: I think I would view it from the point of view of how you best help the customer find you, and what I’m suggesting to my clients right now is that, with local businesses that have a lot of foot traffic, that they put a big call-to-action on their site right near their phone number: Driving Directions. And when you put that into a responsive design, that call-to-action moves right to the top and it’s one of the first things, and you put LX tracking on it so that small businesses can see how many times people through their website went and searched for driving directions. What better customer could that business hope for than somebody who wants to drive to their door? So it’s a great conversion goal as well.

Andre Alpar: So maybe now that Google has invested in Uber, Uber were driving towards that…

Mike Blumenthal: Everything’s a data point for Google.

Andre Alpar: I was just wondering, when you think of local businesses, sometimes there’s more than one business, say, within the same building. You see driving directions to a certain address. You don’t know which one of the businesses it was targeted to. Only if you have something like the map showing it. So, you say that would be smart, like, it’s a big thing to move somewhere where a lot of people drive to, like have a shop in a shopping area that a lot of people commute to?

Mike Blumenthal: [laughs] Well, obviously ‘location, location, location’ right? I don’t think I’d move locations to manipulate Google Maps but I have suggested to businesses that were, say, in the suburbs and they really wanted to be doing business in the city, the reality of GoogleLocal is they may need to open an office in the city. I mean, if they really want to be present in that pack which is now very, very visual and dominant in the SERPs and all the long-tail organic has been pushed off the page. On that front page of local search there’s pins for local businesses, there’s a few local websites – really local websites – and there’s some strong directories, right? The long tail local stuff has been pushed way down.

Andre Alpar: Especially the aggregators, I think they push out drastically.

Mike Blumenthal: Particularly the second-tier guys like Yelp. Yelp is doing a great job of SEO. And some of the YP (YellowPages) stuff. David, Mim and Darren did a great study that states which directories are most prominent in which industries and which markets. What you see in different markets is that different directories have done a good job of being in that vertical in that market. So for example, in many states in the United States there is reasonable regulation of local businesses. In Texas there isn’t, right? Because that’s the state that puts every criminal to death. It’s a wild west down there still.

Andre Alpar: [laughs] You know that this will be viewed in Europe and that’s kind of the cliché.

Mike Blumenthal: Well, it is cliché but I think they can enjoy that. Texas is the Wild West. Is that not right? And that’s a metaphor that holds true politically, is what I’m saying. And so local businesses are not very regulated down there. So for example, a roofing constructor can move into one market after having ripped off another market and since there’s no licensing, he can then go into any market and rip somebody off. That’s an example of lack of government regulation. So into that void the Better Business Bureau steps and they become like a prominent local directory in that region to service that need of verifying that that business is reputable and decent and they’ve done a good job of projecting that value into the SERPs as a high-ranking directory in that local market. But nationally, they don’t do such a good job against, say, Yelp! who’s doing an incredible job of pushing themselves right about the bends in a lot of the results.

Andre Alpar: So I think two other things come to mind that I’d really like to hear your opinion on and I’m sure others would join that. One is: do local businesses really need their own website? Or should they probably have their own Google+ Local account and just push that straight forward from every direction? So that’s my one thought and the other is – probably because there’s a mixed answer to it – I think Google bought the service that is specialising in making websites for restaurants? I forgot the name. So what are your thoughts on that? Will Google kind of become the site-making machine for local businesses and they shouldn’t make their own sites anymore and they should just put it out on Google+ and that’s it?

Mike Blumenthal: Let me deal with the first one, which is if small businesses should have a website. Google looks for proxies for prominence. And in the case of local, the primary proxy for prominence – Google calls it their balance, their authority page – is a website. Right, so that’s issue one. To generate an authority document in Google’s eyes it can’t be Google+ it has to be a website. So that’s issue one. Issue two is that the algorithm has become what I call ‘tri-modal’. There are basically three ranking criteria that bring them into a single ranking scheme. So, all local searches are ambiguous. Do you want the one that’s most prominent? Do you want the one that’s closest? Do you want the business that has the best web prominence? So there’s an ambiguity in a query for ‘pizza Seattle’, typically. Do you want the closest one or the best one? So Google says we have two ways to determine prominence and one way to determine proximity, right? So, when you see a PAC result, they mix in the first two or three that are typically web-prominent results and 3 through 7 are location-prominent, i.e. a lot of citations in the news without good websites or they’re very close, okay, because Google doesn’t know. So, a website is very important to rank in the highest levels of local SERPs these days. So not as important as a place for Google to assign authority, as a proxy for the entity that is the business, but it’s important because it influences the local algorithm directly. And what was your second question?

Andre Alpar: My second question was about what company Google purchased, as a restaurant owner you can build your own website through that service and that would connect that to Google+ and that would seem to seamlessly be 100% Google-dependent and you can probably book or order meals via that.

Mike Blumenthal: Yes, it does offer an action platform on top of web development.

Andre Alpar: So it was kind of both.

Mike Blumenthal: Google does a lot of… they have money to burn. And they do a lot of testing. They acquire a lot of talent. The people of that organisation are apparently very, very good so Google acquired some really great programmers who have been very successful at developing a product.

Andre Alpar: It’s a Seattle-based company, actually. Since we’re in Seattle, I saw a picture that they’re based here somewhere.

Mike Blumenthal: Yes. And so from a long-term view of Google you have to understand that they view the world as their oyster and they view every digital transaction as their goal and so one can’t underestimate what they will do. Whether they will get into building websites you know, beyond restaurants or with restaurants we don’t know. Certainly the reason they haven’t done it in the past is that it put them too much in conflict with the rest of the industry. They’re now strong enough, they might do it. But there are many other plays, right? And when Google brings a product into the market it has to scale both worldwide and be profitable on a worldwide scale and, you know, they dropped Couponing last week. They just cut it after they bought two big couponing companies that had an incredible product. Instead of trying to put it into the local business center or into the new dashboard which rolled out today. They tried to sell it at scale and it didn’t succeed – boom, gone. So you never know with them. I mean, they keep trying until they get it right, though. That’s one thing. They’re fierce competitors, that’s the other. And they have a playbook: when they feel existentially challenged, they will do everything to stop that existential challenge.

Andre Alpar: That’s quite a dark opinion for a US-person to speak. Usually the US opinions I get are more politically, I don’t know, milder I would say. That’s kind of a dark view – you could come to Europe with that view! Maybe Germany! I’m just joking.

Mike Blumenthal: It’s an effort to achieve clarity in the reality of the economic situation that tends to exist in capitalism and in capitalism, technology companies achieve oligopolism very quickly, and they can lose their oligopoly almost as quickly. I think that neoclassical economics don’t explain those behaviours very well. They can’t even explain how monopolies occur. And so I look at it more from a Keynesian or perhaps even Marxian perspective – they understand that business either gets big or it dies, right? They build that into their model and after you give Google credit for having been a great capitalist. I can’t call Google evil, though, because Bing would do it just as quickly if they could. They did do it. And all the other capitalists ganged up on them and got some kind of anti-trust restraints on them. Well, what’ll happen to Google is maybe the same thing. But the European Union, like the Americans, like the Federal Trade Commission – they’re not concerned about you and me as consumers. They’re concerned about the impact of Google on other big companies. So only when other big companies, really big companies, get together to try and constrain Google in an anti-monopoly situation, will they succeed? That’s not grim, that’s just… this is the world we live in. It’s a cold, hard world. Capitalism sucks. It doesn’t care about people, it cares about one thing: profit. Is that the world I would choose to live in? No. But that’s the world I live in. Google rolled out MyBusiness today. MyBusiness is a final integration of GooglePlaces with Google+ in the context of a new small business brand called MyBusiness. So for the first time in a number of years Google has a forward-facing brand that they can take to a small business and say: ‘Do you wanna interact with Google? You do it at MyBusiness.’ So besides it being a brand, it’s a portal for all small business-related products. Business can go there and enter their basic local business data, they can go there to do their social posts, they can add their photographs, but they can also see their engagement analytics on social and they can see their regular analytics.

Andre Alpar: I missed that while listening to sessions at the conference!

Mike Blumenthal: You were in the wrong session!

Andre Alpar: So sorry, I’ll note that down for next time [laughs]

Mike Blumenthal: So not only is it a brand and a portal, it’s a platform on which they will now be able to develop new local small business products very quickly and push it in a modular way, right? In and out. And they rolled this out simultaneously on desktop, Android, iPhone.

Andre Alpar: Wow.

Mike Blumenthal: Think of the resources they’ve put into that to integrate products from Google Analytics, Google+, Google Places into a single unified interface with a single push out into the market place with a brand and all that stuff. That’s a huge move. And so for me, Google has laid down the gauntlet in Local. You know, they spent the last two years – two and a half years – fixing the mess that they had created in Local. Because when Local started…

Andre Alpar: –That’s what I actually wanted to do, I wanted to ask: Local is full of spam. I think, compared to regular SEO. Yes, in the dark sides of the web there’s always spammy stuff, but I think that the average search result quality within Local at least in Europe it’s terrible. I’m not sure, maybe in the states everything’s better because the data is better and it’s more structured and more thought-through. But you know, there’s no comparable efforts to coming down from the quality in Google Local. Does this make sense to you? Or does it sound just like a weird perspective from overseas?

Mike Blumenthal: It’s a superficial perspective. One of the things about spam is that it demonstrates that Local is here. It demonstrates that there’s huge economic interest and value in it.

Andre Alpar: Absolutely.

Mike Blumenthal: So that means that Local has arrived as a significant marketing channel. Google has invested a lot, but there are whole new challenges and whole new technologies they need to develop. But they have in place fairly sophisticated spam verification right from the point of verification through. And there’s various filters they put in place so while a listing may make it into Google Maps, quite frequently spam is buried in page 2 of Google Maps where nobody sees it; it never makes it to the front page of Google. It’s hard to know exactly how much spam there is, but I do know that they’ve done a good job of making sure they know that by the time this business entity or this listing makes it through these various filters to get to the front page, usually on the front page those 7 results are pretty good. Now again, there is spam in Maps but you gotta go looking for it. No user’s looking for it. Google views it from a Big Data perspective. If the user doesn’t see it, it doesn’t hurt anybody. You [Andre] as an SEO, I as a Local geek, we’ll go looking for that crap and yeah, it’s there. But the question is, what does the end-user experience look like? That sits on their iPhone and says ‘show me the local restaurant’ and it’s not there. And so then, with restaurants, it’s often clean because there are a lot of user-generated content, there’s a lot of good signals. In some verticals such as locksmiths and moving companies there’s more spam and Google has spent a fair bit of research combatting those guys. But you know, these are some of the smartest people in the world. They’re up against Google, also some of the smartest people in the world. It’s an interesting battle. Um, I would say that in the worst categories in the United States, the front 7 listings, 85% to 90% of them are accurate. In the worst categories! In the better categories, like restaurants or hotels, they are virtually 100%. There’s no spam.

Andre Alpar: Well, that’s great. I get your point, you know, let’s say the ‘biased’ perception of spam in Local.

Mike Blumenthal: Yeah, I got that. It’s there and it’s true, but it’s one of the ways Google deals with it. It’s not visible.

Andre Alpar: Yeah, it’s there but not in the front.

Mike Blumenthal: Yeah, I mean who cares, right? How many persons does a business sitting the second or third page of Google Maps get? It’s insignificant.

Andre Alpar: Alright, well, thanks so much for your time, Mike.

Mike Blumenthal: Yes! Thank you.