Darren Shaw has been developing websites since 1996 and has been optimizing them for the search engines since 2001. He loves all areas of internet marketing, but is currently obsessed with local SEO. He is the founder of an Edmonton Search Engine Optimization company, Whitespark, and developed the popular Local Citation Finder tool for helping SEOs and businesses find citations. Follow Darren on Twitter.

Along with Garrett French, Ben Wills what was the biggest inspiration behind building the Local Citation Finder?

There wasn’t really any inspiration. Garrett came up with an original and brilliant idea, wrote this awesome post about it, and I figured I could build a tool to automate the process. We had the first version of the tool working in a couple days. Hundreds of development hours later, we have built it into a powerful citation analysis tool. It’s the only citation analysis tool on the market as far as I know.

From the latter end of 2010 and the introduction into the SERP`s of more generic keywords, how has this impacted on the results the LCF is fetching, has it improved the number of sources?

That’s a great question. I hadn’t compared the number of sources before and after the rollout of the new SERPs. I just ran a few new searches to see the difference:

Edmonton Flowers
August 17th, 2010: 207 citation sources
Feb 3rd, 2011: 310 citation sources

Edmonton Plumbing
August 30th, 2010: 174 citation sources
Feb 3rd, 2011: 243 citation sources

Edmonton Windows
Sept 22nd, 2010: 216 citation sources
Feb 3rd, 2011: 244 citation sources

Unfortunately I don’t have test data from right before the change, and right after. That would be more valuable for this question. There certainly appears to be an increase though. That could be because Google is giving the top positions to businesses with more citations, or, it could be just that those businesses with the top positions for these terms have been working on their citation building over the past 6 months.

My gut tells me that when the SERPs changed it naturally increased the number of citations the tool returned because the sites with top rankings would now have stronger organic SEO, and thus, more links and more citations. Before, you could have top rankings with a claimed place page, a well targeted and claimed Place Page, a few citations, and plenty of reviews. Now, you need to have strong onsite and offsite organic SEO as well.

Local SEO is fast becoming a must have tactic and Andrew Shotland and Mike Blumenthal among others have been at the forefront for a while now, how do you see Local SEO developing over the coming year?

Local is exploding. I think you’ll see many new Local SEO focused businesses open and a number of Local SEO tools come out. Small businesses are scaling back their Yellow Pages spend and turning to Local SEO in droves. It’s about time! I have some clients that were paying Yellow Pages $5000/month for all the advertising they were doing with them. That’s nuts. In many markets, the return on investment from a Local SEO campaign is 100 times what you get from Yellow Pages.

In addition to Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) and Mike Blumenthal (@mblumenthal), I would recommend also following David Mihm (@davidmihm), Matt McGee (@mattmcgee), Chris Silver Smith (@si1very), Mike Ramsey (@niftymarketing), and fellow Canadians Dev Basu (@devbasu), Matthew Hunt (@smbusinesscoach), and Steve Hatcher (@axemedia) .

Geo-tagging sites like Foursquare and Gowalla are a consideration for SEO for local search and citations, do you see an expansion in this direction or have these sites nailed it already?

Yes, I think we’ll see huge expansion. I’m sure we’ll see more and more companies add check-in features. We’ve already seen Facebook places, and Twitter places, and I can see Google HotPot adding check-in options as well, but I don’t expect it to be very successful.
Foursquare continues to dominate and innovate in this space, and I think they will for the foreseeable future. Small businesses should get involved with Foursquare now. There is low competition, so, it’s a great opportunity to get your business front and center on the service. I could go on, but Chuck Reynolds nails it in these two posts:

Local Search Marketing Using Foursquare
What Foursquare 3 Means to Small Business

If there was one single tip you could give to a site owner for Local Search what would it be?

Only one?! You won’t get top rankings if you only do one thing, but if I can only provide a single tip it would be to make sure your NAP (name, address, phone number) are consistent everywhere on the web. So, don’t use call tracking numbers (this is related, so, still just one tip!). See: http://searchengineland.com/the-problem-of-inconsistent-smb-contact-details-%E2%80%93-part-i-37322.

Bonus tip: with the new blended local results, links to your website with localized anchor text (eg: chicago hair salons) are the fast track to top rankings. Do some backlink analysis on your top competitors and look specifically at the links with optimized anchor text. Figure out how they are getting those, and do the same. Look at the top ranking businesses in other major cities for more ideas.

Is Local search citation in the quantity or the quality, should we be building citations enmasse or concentrating on the same sites that rear their heads for the keyphrase?

As in link building, it’s both. You want plenty of citations, but, a single good citation can be worth 100 junk citations. To determine the value of a citation source, I like to use the same metrics that I use in link building: Age of Domain, SEOmoz Domain Authority, and Majestic AC Rank. We also have our own metric that we developed through the data collected from the Local Citation Finder. We’re still tweaking the algorithm, but should have it ready to release within a couple of months.

Judging the value of a citation source requires more than just evaluating the link building metrics though. You have to think local. In my opinion, a mention on a small hyper-local blog with your name, address, and phone number is more valuable than a superpages.com listing, even though superpages is going to have much higher values when you look at the link building metrics.

I have not seen raw volume of citations be the dominant ranking factor. In all the competitive analysis reports we’ve put together, the businesses with the most rankings are not always the businesses with the most citations. You can see a real world example of this in the example competitive analysis report that is linked on our local SEO description page.
I like to use sponsorships for quality citations. Find a local sports team or charity with your city in the domain name, and decent backlink strength, and sponsor them. Be sure to get your NAP and an anchor text optimized link out of the deal.

How much does personalised search skew the Local Search results?

Great question! I really don’t know. I would assume it would affect local results in the same way it affects organic results. I just ran some tests and I definitely get different results if I’m signed in. The sites I visit most often rank higher when I’m signed in. So, I’m just going to assume that local is skewed by personalization as much as organic.

As a small business owner or new to Local SEO where should I be looking to for further reading on getting started?

I really like Dev Basu’s five part article on Web Marketing Today. It’s a perfect beginner’s guide to place page optimization, website optimization for local, citation building, and review acquisition. Plus, you can read the whole thing in under 30 minutes.
For further reading, these are my favourite sources:

• Mike Blumenthal: http://blumenthals.com/blog/
• David Mihm: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/
• Andrew Shotland: http://www.localseoguide.com/
• Matt McGee: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/
• SEL’s Local’s Only Column: http://searchengineland.com/library/locals-only
• SEL’s Small is Beautiful Column: http://searchengineland.com/library/small-is-beautiful
• GetListed’s Learning Centre: http://getlisted.org/resources/

How did you first start out into delving into the SEO space?

I built an e-commerce store for my sister’s company, Education Station, back in 2001. We started looking at search results for “teaching supplies” and wanted to get ranked. Oh it was so easy back then! I did some research and learned the basics of title tags, image alts, general keyword stuffing, and link building. I built a script to auto-email all these small websites with lists of “teacher resources”.

I’d search around for the sites, find their contact info, then add them to my script. “Hello $name, I was just checking out your site with awesome teacher resources. Great site! Have you seen Education Station’s new site? I think it would fit in perfectly with the other links you have on the page.” Back then, my success rate with this tactic was about 70%!! These days, anyone with a “links” page has probably had to get a new email address because of the spam.

2011 for SEO is the year of ….. ?

Local, of course! More search engine focus on local, more local specialists, more local tools, more local SEO awareness.

Huge thank you to Darren for agreeing to the interview and I think you will agree, packed with insights. Want more? you are insatiable, ok read more SEO Questions.