Ep 65: How to Optimize Your Local SEO with Darren Shaw of Whitespark

Problem: 

Today, Dave is talking with Darren Shaw about his SaaS business, Whitespark. Today’s conversation is all about what Dave and Whitespark are doing in order to stay relevant and at the top of their game.

What is Whitespark?

Whitesparks works to help improve your business’s rankings, drive visitors to your site, and fast-track your success in local search. They use their own brand of tools and managed citation services in order to help your business do what it does best.

On the nuances of local SEO

1. Optimizing your website
2. Getting links to your website
3. Google My Business listing
4. Reviews (on Google and other sites)
5. Citations (business listings and blogs, etc.)

We gravitated toward [local SEO] in the beginning basically because it was the client market that we served, but then I became obsessed with it because I think it’s the best.

On keeping the software relevant

It’s tough working in SaaS because the world of technology is constantly changing and evolving. A number of SaaS businesses have trouble staying relevant in these changing times. But Darren doesn’t have a problem with that. Since the core mission of Whitespark is pretty evergreen, they are always pretty relevant. The only thing they need to change and chase (to keep up with the times) is Google’s design updates for Whitespark’s ranking software.

Even though SEO is changing all the time, the core functionality of our software hasn’t needed to change.

On challenges that Whitespark has faced

Just like any business, Whitespark has had their fair share of challenges. One that Darren points out, has been with the landing page and customer confusion. When a customer would need to have their Google search stats optimized, they would go to Whitespark and not know where go or which product or tier to try. Upon realizing this pattern, Darren and his team have decided to make that one of their key fixes for 2021.

This is actually part of our roadmap for 2021, is to integrate everything into a single unified platform that helps you solve all of the problems of local search in just one interface. 

On their industry report

Darren has had the torch for the Industry Report passed onto him a about five years ago. This is a survey of the top 30 – 50 local search experts. They are known experts in the local search space. After surveying the data from these experts, you can then use the information as actionable data. You can find the 2020 report here.

It becomes a bible for local search. It’s used by all the agencies. Anyone that’s in SEO that needs to understand local, this is the first stop for “Hey, what’s currently driving local rankings and what is my priority list?”