The SEO Insider: Law Firm Digital Marketing and Beyond

Seth & Mike Blumenthal: The Godfather of Local Search

December 08, 2020 Seth Price Season 1 Episode 9
The SEO Insider: Law Firm Digital Marketing and Beyond
Seth & Mike Blumenthal: The Godfather of Local Search
Show Notes Transcript

Mike Blumenthal, the co-founder of GatherUp, joins Seth this week to discuss the local search. Mike has been focusing on it since the very beginning and talks with Seth about what the future may hold for local results going forward.

BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of Blushark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.


Seth Price

Welcome Mike Blumenthal, one of my favorite people in the space, the founder and director of local research for GatherUp.


Mike Blumenthal

Co-founder, not founder, co-founder.


Seth Price

Co-founder. Mike, one of my favorite people in this space, you are one of those guys early on who focused on local when it was not, not a sexy topic.


Mike Blumenthal

Is there something besides a local?


Seth Price

I mean, as far as, no, right? I mean-


Mike Blumenthal

If that's all there ever was, that's all there ever will be.


Seth Price

To be fair, when you first started, there was stuff beyond local, you know, and it was like you, you, you zeroed in before everybody else realized how cool it was.


Mike Blumenthal

It's a tale, it's that in the process of wagging the dog, I mean, it will become bigger than general search. And it will become the way people think of search going forward. To the point to the exclusion of, of other things, you know, and I see Google moving in this direction, aggressively. So they get it, finally, and they're putting all their money, putting a lot of their resources into that. So we'll see.


Seth Price

Well, question, because you follow this as long as anybody one of the frustrations for people who geek out on the space like myself, you know, we spend our time we understand organic, we understand local as it is, and yet spam still permeates it in a way that reminds me of search, when we first met when spam still ruled the day in search, when will Google get its act together and clean this up?


Mike Blumenthal

Well, I've been, as you know, focused on map spam for well over 12 years at this point, and I've come to the conclusion that Google doesn't...I mean there's a number of issues going on that all interplay, one, section 230 provides Google with categorical protection against spam. So there's no legal or structure in which they exist a regulatory structure that requires them to regulate it. Two, thay're a bottom up engineering company that looks at problems in a in a different way than most people think about. And in a bottom up, engineering company, engineers do what they are interested in, not what you're interested in. And so projects that take on a life get brought to fruition and it really category internally, they get tested and tried. And if it works, and it scales, took a zillion people. But while they're scaling, they don't get much care for real world issues like you. So basically, when our interface interfaces with their interface, what appears to us as cast is their way of doing business. So they have a style that basically forces them to work on big projects and ignore little details. And then finally, they do this silly analysis, basically, because from their point of view, "maps is free". And those are, for those of you who are listening, those are air quotes I'm putting around it, they make this arbitrary distinction internally between a free product like maps and a paid product, like ads, although it's hard to tell the difference these days. So they ended up rationalizing lack of attention. And then they do the dumbest statistical analysis. They say, oh, one half of 1% of spam is seen. Well, yeah, if you count all the churches and other stuff, it comes down to one half of 1%. But in reality, too much bigger percentage, because spam is very local, it's very localized in high value categories. So all those things contribute to a company that all they do when they get caught and they get their hand slapped as they say, oh, spammers are getting smart, it's like whack a mole, we're gonna have to whack them again this month, and then they do something for three or four months, and then they go back to the way they were doing it. So it's it, while annoying to you and me. It's admittedly a very profitable strategy. They've grown to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. They obviously don't care about spam the way you and I do.


Seth Price

Is there, is there a potential that they actually like it and that it takes up space from and forces you know, three companies could be and we we started when we met you met each other with seven, you got three companies fighting for this air, quote, free space, by allowing spam in it's forcing you hey, you're bumped out, you got to go buy ads, is that part of it? Or is it...


Mike Blumenthal

It's hard to describe maliciousness to incompetence when it shouldn't be it's just basic lack of human caring or lack of human competence? I don't think it's malicious or intentional in the sense that you state, but the fact that matter is they're unwilling to do, they have whatever it is 70,000 engineers at this point, the fact that they're unwilling to put two on it permanently, says a lot about the company the way they work, and the The fact that they haven't pretty much done and that they deal with it reactively instead of proactively tells you how successful they've been in doing that, they basically view, they don't deal with the problem till the noise really bubbles up into the press, then they put a few resources on him. And then once the press dies down, they go back to doing it the way they're doing it. This is how they work and spam is just seen as one of those noise. It's not, you know, it's that the signal, it's the noise and so they don't care. They don't care about in the way you care about, despite the fact that I can send a scraper out and find 2000 lead gen listings for insurance in 10 minutes. They don't seem interested in that. So..


Seth Price

Well, I mean, look, you've been there, you've been that stalwart one of the people that has does have the ear of people there. You know, when I, when I look at this, I say, I see a couple things, one of which is it, you know, you could give them in five minutes advice, my guess is, which is, hey, you let websites be in a sandbox for a while you're not doing that here five reviews in a competitive market? Why are you showing someone with zero or one reviews against people that have been in the market for years, there are some basic things that it was just not complete and utter, not caring that they could easily create. I get exact match as an issue, because some of the relevant places are exact match. But it just seems like that the lack of caring in an area, we started the interview saying, Is there anything other than local, so they care about user experience? And yet, the permeation of spam? Do we, Oh, you're just gonna have to wait for that New York Times or Wall Street Journal article like we did with the eyeglass store, or JC Penney, we're waiting for a seminal article to get to shame Google to make, to make them?


Mike Blumenthal

Well, we've had several articles, there was a very significant article about drug rehab abuses and the pain and suffering that drug rehab abuse caused, Google partnered up with a not-for-profit that catalogged every legitimate drug rehab center in states, and then vetted that information against Google, Google back there and facing against the list. And then that was in 2015-2016. And then, not six months ago, maybe 2017, then six months ago, we saw the influx of 1000s of Google drug rehab spam listings. You know, they, they don't view it as a problem, because they don't view it. They view it only at scale as it compares to the greater database set. So if they have 125 million business listings in the world, and maybe 17 million United States, and they have three or 400,000 or 500,000 spam listings, that don't show very often in search by their analysis, they don't see as a problem. It is a problem. I get it's a problem. And, but I stopped recommending ideas to them, because again, they have 90-80,000 engineers working for him, they're smart enough or smarter, to be able to come up with solutions. What they don't have is a way to identify it as a legitimate problem worthy of ongoing resolution. And that's an institutional issue. And it's a regulatory issue. The only thing that's going to change, this isn't the article in New York Times, because I've had numerous articles New York Times, like I said, it happens, they fix a few bad articles in the CBC in Canada, and they fix it for a little bit, and then the stuff comes back. And this has been going on for 12 years where you'd get a high profile article in different verticals, and in different levels of national news, it would go in for six months, then it would come back. The pattern is what's important. It's only going to change if there's regulatory oversight, either change in two thirds section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives them more obligation to take this down once reported and or, antitrust regulations that puts this at the forefront because in a sense, it's fake news is is as bad as anything that Facebook does, propagating bad stories, this propagates, you know, an illegitimate listing, probably with illegitimate reviews into a consuming marketplace that's not sophisticated enough to know that they're, you know, calling a spammer or a fake location. And, but we're in a legal environment, which looks locations, fake locations aren't illegal. I mean, you know, you know about the law, you can tell me but why isn't that illegal? It shouldn't be it's a form of advertising deception, and yet as far as I can tell, there's no laws against it.


Seth Price

No, it's, it's, look, I've seen it go full circle when I started practicing, Virginia did not allow virtual offices. They had to go that way because the practice of law legitimate lawyer were using them for their practice, they didn't need an office full time, it was a cost effective way to do business. You know, and what we have seen, I'll tell give Google credit, almost too much, they have done their best to wipe out virtual offices, for the most part, they've actually put some effort into it very often taking out legitimate ones with it. That's sort of the cost of doing business I get, but that's the one area where I've seen a little bit of work, it's just the amount of effort it takes to flag something like that is pretty astronomical, and a flood keeps coming.


Mike Blumenthal

Alright, I, these days when I'm working on spam, I try to work on spam at scale, right? Because I figured if I can point out to Google, a large network, maybe they could figure out how that network extends and kill more spam. And Whitesburg actually built me a tool that allows me that uses a technique I developed to find spam. And they can allows me to easily and quickly find large scale spam occurrences. So when I'm doing spam work, which I do still as a hobby, on occasion, I do, try to do it at scale and then escalate it.


Seth Price

But is this a Mike only tool? Or is this something part of-


Mike Blumenthal

It's a Mike only tool that you know, it's very crude at this point. At some point, it may roll into the white spark suite. But right now it's a Mike only tool that helps me find large scale, large scale spam. Who else in the world has this as a hobby, I would ask.


Seth Price

I, look, I'm set you know, the SEC second-tier hobbyist in this space, I get it, you know at night, and it goes you know, what's really fascinating is to see the spammers very often going one step below the major words, there's definitely spam at the top words, no argument. But the place where I see it proliferating is one or two terms in where there's significant traffic, but not the primary traffic, where their people don't have the resources to fight it, you know, seeing it in comp, over injury where there's a lot less resources going into it, those areas have just been flooded.


Mike Blumenthal

And it's fascinating to me that it's in, it's in the working trades, like locksmiths, garage door moving, roofing, but it's also in its you don't see it a whole lot in accounts, but you see it everywhere in lawyers, I find that interesting, I think speaks a little bit to see space.


Seth Price

It's you know, I think that if there's if there's somebody buying the leads, whether it be insurance, for profit education, or locksmiths those are people that you know, people turn to search. That's why it's so powerful.


Mike Blumenthal

Yeah. Right. And so the lead if the lead value is high enough, there's spam for sure.


Seth Price

You know, the interesting thing, since you and I have spoken last, you know, is the advent of the local service ads. One of my thoughts was, why is that green checkmark not being used as a, as a trump factor, you're going through a Pinkerton background check, I want to get your thoughts on what you see with LSA, where you think it's going?


Mike Blumenthal

Yeah, I saw it as a response to their inability to really cope with spam or to want to cope with spam, put a monetary value on it, to create a process which could elevate a business to a higher level of trust. And then our selling that trust level, right, you can now get in some markets, in some industries, get a badge profit, you dollars.


Seth Price

Legal is fully built out at this point we are.


Mike Blumenthal

But what we're seeing is abuses there that are unregulated as well, right? Again, they built this whole system, on top of ads on top of local, you should have expected spam, they could have expected spam, they could have built in systems to prevent spam. And yet it's rapidly filling up with spam. So, again, what does that tell you about Google? It doesn't they don't give a shit. So you know.


Seth Price

Yeah, it just it seems that when Google wants something, if if they again, goes back to what you said, if they cared, you know, they figured out link spam, they did a pretty good job. I mean, it still works and people do it, but it's not the way it was, you know, seven, eight years ago. This is one of those ones that there's we take a lot less from where I'm sitting for them to do something about this. But you know, where do you see do you think that the you know, the one of the things that's always been sort of the the ultimate dagger to organic SEO would be a paid three pack? Do you think that three pack will be paid at some point?


Mike Blumenthal

Well, I don't like to work in specific future predictions. I've sort of look at the big picture here google is either wants data or to be paid one or the other. And when you look at trends in, in local what you see are several large trends. One is the move towards visual search in most shopping categories. big trend is towards, you know, intelligently bringing in images that relate to the query, whether they're product searches or service searches. Another big trend is towards the transaction, right? So they are on a vertical by vertical basis, developing the call to action that leads to a some sort of transaction, get a quote, make an appointment, reserve a table. So that's another big trend, that the other third is that they are moving a lot of discovery into Google Maps, right? So in that context, Google has the demands of every capitalist company, to return crypt, to provide greater returns to their stockholders. And if there's a finite amount of space, and the returns have to go up, either the price of the ad goes up, or the volume of the ads go up. So it, I don't know that all three will be taken, or, but you can bet that more and more surfaces will have ads, and how it looks, I couldn't say but the demands of the marketers such, Google is funding all of their other moonshots with ad revenue. And so they're gonna maximize ad revenue as much as they can.


Seth Price

Absolutely. Let's pivot to reviews. You know, you've spent your last few years playing in that sandbox, you know, becoming, you know, for the first time, we actually saw the acknowledgment that the number matter. What do you see what's the future of reviews, it's one of those areas that spam is filling up at the same time. You know, legitimate businesses have, have to stay, stay in step with it, you know, where are we? Where are we going?


Mike Blumenthal

We're going I think most actors in the review space businesses review view it in a very limited way. They view it as a one more review, to compare themselves with a guy on the street that has one less review. You know, when I look at reviews, I try to look at it from the marketing and management point of view. So I view it much more broadly, at first and foremost, reviews are a way to listen to your customers, understand what they're thinking, and to act on it through management insights. And then to market creating, a what John James calls the hourglass of, the hourglass of marketing where somebody comes in, they they find you maybe do two reviews, they come to your business they call they're happy. And in the beginning of your interaction with them. You say to him, Look, I we expect you to be satisfied. And we're going to ask you at the end of that you will, whether you were and will you kindly give us that feedback? Yes. So they write a review, which then drive and they're happy. So they get driven back to the hourglass to come back into your business. And they write a review. So other people get driven through the hourglass to come back in your business. So reviews plays a critical role in running a great business. But a review isn't just to review Google, Google doesn't care where they review is, they don't care if the reviews at Yelp or any other site, they can scrape you in the Yellow Pages or Better Business Bureau, they don't care from a ranking point of view, from an understanding of your business point of view. They'll look everywhere. Businesses, though, and Google's needs are different. And a business needs to maximize their interaction with their customers to create this flow, to grow their business and that. So a review, one review of Google may drive a new customer in your business, but it does nothing to keep the customer into that loop, or for them to recommend you to other customers. So in the end only through a business, doing these other things, i.e. improving, and then using reviews and marketing can ever extract full value of review. So for me, it's a long answer to say that reviews go way beyond Google reviews. For example, Facebook reviews, well, that many people are looking at reviews on Facebook. But what's interesting about Facebook is it's the only place you have a conversation around your review, right? Yelp reviews still have some value. They don't send a lot of leads, but they do, you know, factor in your reputation at Google. They also factor in your rank and Google send you there. But as Google sort of eats the long tail of local search, and all these, these review companies sort of decline, Yelp and Facebook, then you have a choice as a business to become totally dependent on Google for reviews. Where as you're finding out their problems, or to own your own digital asset in the form of views. To me owning your own reviews is the best way to, is a great alternative strategy. To complement your Google review strategy. I get reviews yourself from your customers. One, you'll get them in much greater numbers. Because in any business, if 10% of your customers are willing to leave you a Google review, 30% or 40% are willing to give you a direct review. These direct reviews are more honest, they give you a better sense of how you're doing. So it actually contribute more to the hourglass flow, helping you improve your business. Without much more data, you can have much better analytics about what's going on in your business. And then you can develop a whole range of great marketing around these reviews, using them for social proof, using them for social posts, using them for content on your pages. One of the problems in local is generating great page content, well, it's hard, you're busy, you're running your business, so you don't have great page content, let your consumers with this high volume of reviews, both Google's and first parties, let them flow to your pages, right. Which page, well, whichever page the review speaks about, with enough volume of reviews, you can actually look at the reviews, automatically tag them. So if you want to review around motorcycle injuries that mentions motorcycle injuries, the software now can find that review posted on your motorcycle injury page. So reviews can be used for management and marketing, as well as all these other things. But it only makes sense if you sort of look outside the Google narrow focus that most people have not to say that Google is important. You get your Google reviews in order. Once you do that, then you move on to the bigger picture of getting your review house in order in terms of management and marketing. So it's it to me is a much richer story than getting one more fricking Google review who gives a shit. I know, you do, but-


Seth Price

But that's that's the irony look to cut, I'm smiling as you're saying this, because, okay, take first assume for a second, you're dealing with a legit business. You've worked with them before in the non legal space in the legal space, there are places they're doing all the right stuff. Ironically, it was what they now banned with Gateway pages, which was getting the review upfront, and then only pushing to Google once, once you had one that you that you love. So one of the ironies of the elimination of Gateway pages is that whole practice of a pre review being used sort of got, got hammered down.


Mike Blumenthal

And my research, though, indicates...what you're talking about is gating, right? Where users given a choice, if they give you a negative, they're taken not taken to Google page of the positive Google positive page. By my research indicated, I looked at a large number of reviews in a fairly boring industrym insurance. And we had a very interesting use case, because they shut off gating one day to the next, when Google said, Let's shut off gating. And we looked at 100,000 reviews with gating versus our 100,000 user interactions versus 100,000 user interactions after gating. And what we found was after no gating, they moved from gating to no gating, large number of users roughly 100,000 ball situations. And what we found was that with no gating, their rating dropped a small amount, not even, I don't think it was statistically valid amount, it was, like 4.6 to 4.58, or something, not a big drop cost, hundreds of 100,000 ads. Well, what happened was their review volume went to the roof, high, sky high. So gaining, which we all thought businesses needed.


Seth Price

I get it.


Mike Blumenthal

Consumers don't like it, apparently, and you do better without it. So what, so getting rid of gating to me was a good thing, because it improved, the flow. And consumers are not stupid. I mean, some of them may be but only as stupid as the businesses that are asking him. And, you know, some are smart, most of them are smart, most of them get that you're trying to prevent them from leaving bad review. It didn't work. If you're, if your company sucked, it sucked, and you still got bad reviews. You know, so to me, the beauty of reviews is being is putting in place a system that can leverage them in all of their richness to understand how your business is doing, to be able to respond effectively to them, to understand how your competitors are doing. And then to use all those in the most powerful marketing ways you can find, dusting off all the old reviews from 2015-2016 and reusing them over and over again in your marketing and automatically on pages and in social posts, that kind of stuff.


Seth Price

Any advice for people who are going up against the Juggernaut in the market that is using review spam using dubious techniques to get the count up?


Mike Blumenthal

You know, to me, one, businesses that run like that have a short lifespan, you know, I've run across them my whole life and in the end, and tended to not worry too much about them, because they tend to burn themselves out. Reviews, from where I sit, are much like a long term customer relation. And long term customer satisfaction plans is a lifelong issue. It's a five or 10 or 20 year issue in your business, what is your customer think? And are they willing to share that with the public, and this was true before reviews exists, existed, and after Google reviews stop existing, this will still be true. And so I try not, I, you know, clearly you can document them and report them to Google, you can make your system as efficient as possible. But in the end, all you can do is worry about you and your business. And honestly deal with the issues that are preventing you from improving.


Seth Price

But this is, this is the frustration you see, which is like very often when I go on to Amazon to buy something, I just want to know there's X number of reviews out there so that some you know some number of people, it's the same widget I'm buying from each of three different places, number does matter. At some level, we've seen stuff as bad as people at a state fair, handing out prizes to get reviews, somebody identifies that in a review. Is there a you know, just like, you know, is there a mechanism that you've seen successful in getting that identified? Or is this another area that Google's like, they just want the user generated content, they could care less?


Mike Blumenthal

If you provide Google with its proof of incentives, they will take the reviews down. You know, they'll take your reviews and yet provide proof of incentives. Is life long enough? I'm not sure. Again, it exists in the cowboy world in which we live with capitalism, which, for some reason, regulatory environments, very weak. So there's no, FTC is, you know, cases have increased over the years, doubled every year from last few years. But enforcement is very weak, nationally, very weakened state level. Somehow capitalism in all of its forms, including illicit ones, seems to be revered, whereas behaviors that should be illegal or not. So you have to understand that some of this you can't do much about because it's the context, when you're up against a wave of business interests that make it difficult to get in place. Consumer friendly policies matter. But, and but you can report them, you can take some of your time to do it. And I think I tend to, in terms of how to spend my time in improving potential reach in search, I think I'd rather spend my time getting spam listings taken down, which will take a lot of fake reviews, rather than spending too much time on fake reviews, just because it opens up spots and allows you to move up. But if you find incentives, you certainly can report them to Google to the you know, they do have the reporting private reporting mechanism, if you do want to report it in a format to be a little careful because you don't want to divulge your name. So you need to use an alias so you don't get in trouble. Some of these spammers, I believe some of the spam is coming out of illegal activity part of larger, more illegal groups, they had to be a little careful in terms of being too public about it. But you can, if you can get your information to go through the redressal form with documentation and a spreadsheet, or through the forum, then Google will take them down.


Seth Price

I'm curious on a personal level, have you had any of these bad actors try to come, you've done it, you've been pretty vocal and done a lot of work in the space.


Mike Blumenthal

A few times, you know, one guy came at me and told me he was going to ruin my reputation and future. Obviously, his strategy was to write crazy ass articles about me thinking that they would somehow rank but you know, the top two pages I've been fairly visible in this industry. So the top two pages about me are obviously...


Seth Price

Obviously, as an SEO I'm very proud, like I'm glad to see that.


Mike Blumenthal

If you dig deep enough on Mike Blumenthal review scam or something, you'll find these articles about me and they're laughable. It's like, you know, cares. Like go ahead, write away, waste your time. I'm more than happy to have you do that. I have had a few friends who are agencies who did not have as much cover as I do. Have some of their customers attacked, which was why Google put in place, the redressal forum, which is private because these attacks were detrimental to not so much the agency but to their clients.


Seth Price

Gotcha. Well, guys, in our final minutes here, before we wrap up, we're you know, you've identified a lot of these things, if you're sort of sitting here and you know, as, as a business owner, what are some of the things that you would be focused on going forward based on where you perceive Google with local headed.


Mike Blumenthal

So, Google is working very hard to create an immersive environment that people can't leave, whether they charge for that, or they don't charge for that, a lot of times they don't charge for it. So I see that you have to create an environment that's visually very appealing to speak to this trend, I spoke of before, where you can, it doesn't matter where the consumer interacts with you, on Google, on your website, there's enough information there for them to be converted, and for you to look better than the competitor. So a huge emphasis on great images, a huge emphasis on both your website and Google My Business, a great emphasis on complete and compelling data in both places, an emphasis on high quality, trusted, verifiable, you know, reviews that that can be shared across your website across Google across all social. But if you look at the trends as immersion, immersion keeping people at Google high, you know, reliance, higher reliance on imagery, and a call to action to get the sale at Google, I think you need to lean into all of those trends, as well as maintaining your website, because your website feeds a lot of the data that Google, reviews are obviously critical. I think bigger picture, though, to me is always that creating a business that truly cares about the customers, and puts in place systems that make these tactics secondary to the systems that care for the customers, because in the end, I think the spammers burnout, there are bright lights for a time. But cheating usually catches up with people sooner or later. And I think that creating long term sustainable relationships with your clients, is the best defense against all these tactics, and then these just become things you do.


Seth Price

And I'm coming from a perspective, I work in a legal vertical, where like, I'm assuming great lawyer and great customer service. The question is, you know, assuming that, but let me conclude because you talked about some white spark presentation the other day, if you're sitting there currently, and you're looking at your GMB at your local, trying to get yourself to the three pack, all of the factors that are out there, what are the two or three that you'd put your thumb on? And which are the two or three that you'd say, yes, they're there, but it's probably not ROI time or effort wise right now.


Mike Blumenthal

So I sent out a tweet last week, you probably saw it was about 10 factors in ranking. And I built the tweet as up to date information. The post was written in 2007. Things have not fundamentally changed since then. So to me that the things that work are a great website, with great internal linking. External linking to the website, great reviews. That's how it all works.


Seth Price

Understood. I'm talking the next posts, photos, video, 360 tour, like what are like the things that like...


Mike Blumenthal

Well, none of them very few of those things impact rank, they do impact what I call conversion optimization. If you assume that the local is very local, and people are going to see you three, four or five miles from your location, then the question is, do you look better than the competitors in that 3, 4, 5 mile radius? And all those things help with that? Now, to some extent, posts ads, you know, they use posts to justify showing a listing, though, surface posts content, but for the most part, very few of the things at Google will impact rank, but they will impact conversions. What's more important.


Seth Price

I'm going to focus right now on understanding conversion, get it, right. But if there were if you're looking simply like somebody saying I want to have the better shit chance of being the three pack, is it all organic factors or is there anything within the GMB ecosystem that gives you in your opinion, a better chance than your comepetitors.


Mike Blumenthal

A great business name, a great category, physical relationship with your customers, great internal linking on your website, great external linking to your website, a great review program, not just a Google across the web, those are the things that will still work, have always worked. And those are the things that are going to move the needle, the most. The rest of it, as far as I can tell, has minimal impact. Now, there's one thing that I think has an impact on on local ranking that most people are not doing, if you're looking for a tip as to where to be that others are not. And that is public relations. I think great articles in news press have tremendous impact. Even if they don't like to, in local Google is able to identify an article about your company in the Washington Post, the New York Times or whatever newspaper they're looking at, and identify with you. And I've seen tremendous ranking gains coming from articles, this was in a very competitive market, San Francisco, they got some good art press in the San Francisco Chronicle. We saw incredible ranking gains from that. So great PR would be the one thing that I think people aren't doing, that could be done in addition to all the other things that I think move the needle, beyond that, you know, filling in services, filling in your description, doing posts, you know, do not have tremendous impact, if any, on your rank. So I think you should do it anyways.


Seth Price

And the final thing, what are there any things that you sort of see people doing that you sort of like, you sort of internally laugh at saying, Hey, I'm pretty sure these spinning wheels may make you feel better, but you really feel it's not much of a...


Mike Blumenthal

Yeah, all the hooey about geocoding images is one, just hooey. It doesn't hold up to any critical analysis. The other is that there's this, there was this thing that the black local community about linking to your Google CID causing a ranking game. Also hooey. You know, there's one about my maps, creating my maps, concentric rings, my maps doing something, all hooey. Give me a couple of others, I'm sure there's more.


Seth Price

We're gonna have a website, hooey or not hooey, right?


Mike Blumenthal

Right. The reality is that the things that matter have long stayed the same. Don't change much year to year, there are no silver bullets, there's no things that, other than great execution, and each of those things, right, a great business name, a great website, you know, a solid linking plan that is real links. I mean, generating links because you deserve them, not because you want them. And then great internal linking, great reviews, that stuff all helps, we know it helps. And doing those better and more consistently, really comes down to doing it more consistently, and then good articles about your business. These are, Google's trying to emulate the real world. And these are things that are in the real world. And if you can do them a little better then the next company, then you're going to, it's going to show up.


Seth Price

Well, Mike, thank you so much for your time, you've been an inspiration to me personally, I, from the first time I've met you, I've always helped keep me on the straight and narrow and you know-


Mike Blumenthal

It's not narrow, it's a broad path.


Seth Price

I know, but there's so much just-


Mike Blumenthal

It's just looking for the big picture rather than the minutia. Rather than the, the, you know, dog poo that's stuck in my waffle shoe. You know, you're looking for the real important things. And to me, the important things are the customer, right? So it's an issue of keeping focused.


Seth Price

Absolutely. And you've been great at that. And thank you for that mentorship and leadership over the years. Hopefully we get to meet again in person sooner rather than later.


Mike Blumenthal

You can go down for two or three more years. Ignore my advice.


Seth Price

That's not true, I follow it, read it, I take it to heart. So thank you again. Great seeing you.


Mike Blumenthal

Thanks for having me. Be safe out there, okay?


Seth Price

Bye bye.


BluShark Digital

Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.