This week, as the Vertical Measures “Go Local or Go Home” webinar approaches on July 15th, at 8:30AM here in Arizona I spoke with Chuck Reynolds from rYnoweb a nearby local search expert who provides professional web strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), and local SEO services for individuals and businesses alike. He had some fantastic advice on the topic:

Elise Redlin-Cook: There are many local search sites out there. Do you see the market continuing to grow, or narrowing down to a few key players?

Chuck Reynolds: I’d lean towards growth.  Local search is still fairly new and with location-based services being the new gold rush, expect it to grow.  Originally there are a few data providers for business information but with the boom in LBS and human-edited and human grown biz databases the old school names are getting pushed out for things like Foursquare, Yelp and SimpleGEO etc.  Big key players will still be there for years to come but with newer better competition don’t expect to hear much from them down the road.

Elise: What are the best free local search sites today?

Chuck: There’s a little site called Google, and they offer a product called “Places”. It’s free and awesome, do it! Bing’s version Yahoo’s version Yelp Best of the Web Local (free version) Manta.com has been popping lately pretty good too Local.com Also any industry specific (to yours) directory or blog listing is great.  Those are a great start.

Elise: Great advice, so what are the best paid local search sites today?

Chuck: I don’t do much paid stuff but any industry-specific directory or blog is something at least worth looking at – not all are great but they’re a targeted link. Google Local just added “Tags” – get in on that, it’s fairly cheap and not many people are jumping on it yet.  Once you have your business setup and verified in Google Places you can highlight photos or your URL for about $25/mo. Also spending directory buys on http://dir.yahoo.com (after you purchase make sure to edit as you can add a 2nd category), business.com, botw.org (better than the free mentioned above), joeant.com…

Elise: What local search sites would you recommend for businesses with multiple locations?

Chuck: First off if you have multiple locations, remember that good SEO starts on your site with good architecture and clean code, so make sure you have independent pages for the locations – turn them into landing pages for that local search market.  Google Places is key, also if you’re service industry put all the locations into Yelp. Optimize each location not just the main site.

Elise: Merchant Circle allows you to add coupons, reviews, blog posts, etc. Will the other local search sites continue to adopt this trend of allowing more user generated content?

Chuck: Yes and no – blogging on Merchant Circle is pointless – they tried to create some “social media” site and failed horribly.  Coupons and deals are gold, so are reviews.  So yes in the fact that user generated brings the public some addition from business owners, but SMB’s don’t have time to do blogs and stuff on 15 different ‘local search sites.’  Google and Bing are watching reviews of businesses even though people spam them but keep good reviews coming in, they’re not going anywhere.

Elise: Is it more important to be listed on niche sites that are specific to your industry, or the big sites with lots of traffic?

Chuck: Both  I’d say niche for conversions and the “big sites with lots of traffic” to get traffic and do virals, which can maybe lead to conversions.  Niche sites are very targeted, focus a little more of your attention on those but don’t ever forget about the big guys with lots of traffic to send your way.

Elise: Do you see value in the paid listings versus the free listings?

Chuck: Some of them are okay but I don’t focus too much on paid inclusions too much, free is good and there are more of them to makeup for the one big paid link.

Elise: There are mass distribution sites that blast your listing out to various search sites. Are there any that you’d recommend or that you’d recommend staying away from?

Chuck: I’m not going there, usually not safe for people to mess with because they get out of hand.  Twenty thousand links in a few weeks sounds cool, in theory, but that’s bad lol.  For the purposes of this questionnaire - stay away.  Focus on niche and local biz info sites and focus on making your site better – it works.

Elise: If a business doesn’t actually have a brick and mortar location, should they still try to list themselves on local search sites?

Chuck: That’s a little more limited in what you can do as all the sites focus on the assumption that all businesses have an office, which most do but this isn’t 1980 anymore.  Cool thing with that issue is Google Places, earlier this year, allows service-based businesses to set up an “area of service” where you set a radius from a central point and Google will list you when your keywords are searched in those areas.  They also allow you to input a bunch of zip codes if you want that, too.

Elise: What would you say are the top local search ranking factors right now?

Chuck: Standard info here, have a good clean coded site with well-written fresh content with your local keywords, make sure if you have addresses that they’re searchable and different locations have their own page. Claiming your Google Places page and setting that up in the right category with the right keywords. Get good real customer reviews on Yelp, Yahoo and Google.

Elise: So, lets wrap up with my favorite question…tell me, are you driven by any great passions outside of the business arena?

Chuck: You mean something that’s not work? Like hobbies? Hah… what are those?   To be brief: mountain biking, motorcycle rides, anything to do with racing vehicles, hiking/trail running and camping.  I really don’t know – my passion is my work honestly – I love what I do, just perhaps need to take more time for myself one day.

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I hope that you’ve all been enjoying my blog interview series, thus far. I know that I have! I truly feel honored to have the opportunity to speak to the best of the best about industry related topics that are near and dear to my geeky, internet marketing loving heart. In the next three weeks, leading up to our upcoming webinar entitled ”Go Local or Go Home” which will be given on July 15th by our very own Sarah Moraes and Jason Hendricks. I will be speaking to experts of the Local Search realm. As always, I plan to kick it off with a bang.

Therefore, this week I spoke to Mat Siltala the owner of the well known SEO firm Dream Systems Media. He is  also an avid SEO blogger and has been heavily involved in the Internet marketing world for several years. He has consulted with thousands of companies around the world. It’s easy to see that Matt simply loves what he does for a living, which makes us kindred spirits.

Elise Redlin-Cook: There are many local search sites out there. Do you see the market continuing to grow, or narrowing down to a few key players?

Mat Siltala: As more people switch to “app phones” I think we are going to only see more and more of “geo specific” type apps/websites/business emerge.  However; that does not mean all of them are going to survive.  Right now the obvious front runner in local is Yelp (and that is because of their app), and with them adding badges, regular programs and additional features to compete with location based gaming sites such as Foursquare they will just continue to gain in popularity.  There is a growing group of people out there that hate Yelp, so there will always be room for others, but I don’t see them being over taken anytime soon.

Other major players would include sites like City Search, Foursquare, Groupon, GoWalla.  Watch for coupon based sites like Groupon to get bigger and stronger too in the future.  I would also suggest keeping an eye out for companies that are creating services that compliment these sites I mention above – an example would be Snacksquare that goes hand in hand with what Foursquare is doing with their advertising program.   As everyone in this industry knows, things change rapidly – I bet MySpace would not have thought in a few short years they would be the laughing stock of social media.  With that said, my guess is Yelp, Foursquare & Groupon will be the big winners for the next couple of years.

Elise: That’s an interesting prediction. So, in your opinion, what currently are the best free local search sites today?

Mat: Google Places, Yahoo & Bing Local, Yelp, CitySearch, Groupon & Foursquare

Elise: Great, and how about the paid local search sites – which do you prefer?

Mat: If you are going to pay for any local service, I would pay into a site like GetListed.org that makes sure you are on the top ones.  Yelp is free, but they do have an advertising option that has brought many results to my clients too, and well worth looking into.  Angies list is growing some awesome momentum too – I kind of feel like they are the paid version of what most people who love Yelp wish it were.

Elise: What about businesses with multiple locations?

Mat: Most all of these services allow you to do batch uploads that make it easy.

Elise: I know that Merchant Circle allows you to add coupons, reviews, blog posts, etc. Will the other local search sites continue to adopt this trend of allowing more user generated content?

Mat: The dominate player in this group is Groupon, but with the things that Yelp is doing lately (as well as places like Foursquare) I see most location based services to be adding these kind of features and the main part of their programs in the future.  This is going to end up being big in the future of local.

Elise: Is it more important to be listed on niche sites that are specific to your industry, or the big sites with lots of traffic?

Mat: I think both – especially if you live in a bigger city where some of the more niche sites exist.  I am an SEO by nature and only look at is as more citations, more links, more traffic etc.  So I am going to suggest getting everywhere you can!

Elise: What local search sites MUST a business be listed with today?

If you are not listed with Google you are dead in the water (according to Google) If you do not have an app you are dead in the water (according to Steve Jobs)  SO it depends on who you ask, but I would do everything to get my site listed in normal search sites as well as those sites who have apps.

Elise: Do you see value in the paid listings versus the free listings?

Mat: If you are good with ad copy and conversions then YES, there is always value in paid listings, but to just chose one or the other I think is a mistake.  You have to evaluate the bottom line and what it means for your business.

Elise: There are mass distribution sites that blast your listing out to various search sites. Are there any that you’d recommend or that you’d recommend staying away from?

Mat: None that I would recommend here Elise: That’s probably a good answer.  Well then, Lets get a little personal. Do you have any exciting projects that your involved in right now?

Mat: About the only thing I have time for right now is growing my companies and doing everything I can to get our name “out” there in the real world!  I guess its not completely honest to say we don’t have any “big” things going on, but nothing we can really talk about right now (how is that for a teaser?)

Elise: I know what you mean. If only there was more time in the day! So, are you driven by any great passions outside of the business arena?

Mat: I love the NFL, Apple & gadgets, but my first passion is my family and spending time with them.  I love the opportunity this industry gives me to be able to spend as much time as possible with them and for that, I am very grateful!

I think I’d second just about everything that Mat had to say here. How about you?

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Garrett French, co-founded Ontolo, (alongside Ben Willis) a large-scale link building agency that leverages in-house technologies to research, evaluate and acquire targeted, rank-influencing links for clients. Garrett co-wrote Link-Building-Guide.com, also with Ben Wills, which leads motivated readers through the methods and processes of large-scale, crawler-based link research, link acquisition and linker-targeted content strategy. He has also contributed to numerous publications, including Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Guide, Marketing Profs, Search Marketing Standard (web and print), ISEdb, Urban Dictionary and more. This week, I’ll be interviewing him on Link Building Tools.

Garrett: I think the introduction of no-follow was a weak bandaid fix for Google’s reliance on the link graph to determine value. Plus, by introducing and promoting nofollow Google brought even more popular attention to the importance and value of links… kind of like saying "NO" to kids it only makes people more knowledgeable about what impact links can have on search rankings. With this kind of awareness people will be much more likely to deliberately, consciously sculpt their influence, which will ultimately make the link graph less reliable in my opinion. In essence, I believe nofollow may have accelerated the deterioration of the link graph as a means of determining value. /rant. That said, if a no-followed link drives traffic it’s a great link. I try to add a measure of search-influence agnosticism when building links, and focus on metrics like the reach and target audience of the linking site.

Garrett: My focus has remained content creation, but my methods of sourcing link prospects has become faster and exhaustively thorough thanks to working with Ben. I’ve also found that expert-engagement – with group interviews and surveys – can build links and targeted traffic for my clients. Several years ago I was a proponant of article directory submissions. I’m not "against" this method now, but if I’m creating content for off- site publication I look for targeted, high-traffic guest posting opportunities first and foremost as these are ALWAYS more impactful.

Garrett: Typically I’m the content-creator as well as the person conducting outreach, so every editorial link I earn for clients gives me a surge of excitement and pride… I really enjoy adding those inbound linking URLs to the client report spreadsheet I get especially proud of name-brand links to clients, names that they recognize and respect such as (most recently) Time.com and Make.com. When a client adds an "as-seen-on" image to their homepage, that shows that they really appreciated my work. My proudest achievements though are those links that deliver traffic month after month, and content that delivers LINKS month after month.

Garrett: Ben and I are writing an email course on speeding up the link prospecting and qualification process. It’s a free two week course with assignments that will help link builders get much faster and more thorough. Watch our home page over the next couple weeks Oh yes, and as mentioned above we’re launching a link building ebook on the 22nd

Garrett: It’s funny – my passions are what drew me INTO the business arena In college I really really wanted to be a writer, so I wrote. That passion for writing lead me to iEntry, where I learned a great deal about writing’s most important component – the audience Within my love of writing is a love for learning, research, understanding new concepts and I guess my greatest passion is for that moment of profound insight, whether it’s business related or personal!

 Well, this interview wraps up the Link Building Tools Interview Series on the blog. Have anything to add? 

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This week I got to interview Taylor Pratt, Product Marketing Manager at Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a multi-user Web-based application for managing SEO and social media campaigns. Prior to joining Raven, Pratt was a Senior Search Specialist at nFusion where he specialized in search engine optimization (SEO), conversion and Web analytics, and promotes the use of conversion-focused, analytics-based SEO. The tools at Raven are some of my personal favorites, I feel very lucky to have gotten his take on some of my burning link building questions.

Taylor: Absolutely. Competitive research is a great way to lay the groundwork for your link building efforts. It helps give you insight into what is working both in terms of making their site rank, and in terms of obtaining links. By looking at what content they have on their site that is attracting those links, you can learn a lot about what topics and writing style work best.

Elise: What are your views on no-follow vs. do-follow links?

Taylor: I won’t avoid any link that will send me targeted traffic. That is my goal: conversions. I don’t focus on whether or not it will send me traffic from the search engines, as long as a link is sending me the types of visitors that will convert I don’t care if they are no-followed or not. 

Taylor: We actually have a lot of enhancements to our feature set for Enterprise clients that we’re working on right now. We’re creating better access rights and limits, as well as aggregate reporting. We have a couple of other awesome projects in place, but I have to keep those under wraps for now

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