The Conference Connection, hosted by Paul Faust and Seth Price, is your go to place for the best up-and-coming legal conferences. Stay tuned for tips, tricks, and best practices as you learn to navigate the world of events and networking.
Episode 1
The Conference Connection
What's in this episode?
- Introduction to Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark. (0:00)
- Myths that Darren doesn't see credence to where people are advocating. (2:47)
- What is an office? What is the intent of an office? (9:21)
- What are some of the areas where you should focus your time and money right now? (15:01)
Transcript
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
Thrilled to have Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark here with us. Welcome, Darren.
Darren Shaw
Hey, thanks a lot for having me.
Seth Price
You know, I see you everywhere. And you've been very influential part of building, help both Price Benowitz, now BluShark clients. Talk to me about your background and how you came to sort of be the epicenter of all things local.
Darren Shaw
Oh, wow. I don't know if we're the epicenter of all things local but thank you. All right. So Whitespark started in 2005, as a sort of web development agency with just me freelance web, web developer making websites, and then I started getting an SEO because once you make websites for people, it kind of leads to SEO. And the team built it in 2010, we, we launched this software system called the local citation finder, which, you know, after reading a blog post, and figuring out how to do sort of citation analysis, we wrote software for it. And that it was just like, oh, I guess we're a local search company now. So we started building more local search software, I became absolutely obsessed with learning everything I could about local SEO, just and then I started connecting with people in the space and doing some research and got the opportunity to do some speaking, and it just kind of grew from there. And so yeah, now WhiteSpark, we offer tons of different products and services around helping businesses ranking local.
Seth Price
You know, as, as we've developed, and we're focused a lot in the legal space and other professional services, like, you know, cosmetic surgery and things like that, that as I've seen those areas develop, obviously, local is everything. And, you know, you come out with a sort of a report annually, that gives us some sort of idea of where we're efforts that are best spent talking about how that's evolved over the years from when you started it to what we see today.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, sure. So first off, I did not start that. That's the local search ranking factor survey started by David Mann and David started in 2008. And it was just, I think the idea was spawned from what Moz was doing. Moz have the search ranking factors survey, where they're just asked SEOs what they've seen moving the needle. And so David Mim developed it back in 2008, and ran it for many years. In 2017, he passed the rains to me, and I've done the last three editions of it. And yeah, so it's basically just a survey of the top 40 ish experts that are kind of notable people that are speaking about doing research, writing about local search, and kind of getting their combined brainpower into what they see. moving the needle in local search.
Seth Price
No, it's like the ultimate crowdsourcing, you know, I remember from when David was doing it, you know, bet back in the day, that was one of those formative things when you're like, okay, making sure you're not missing using it as a checklist almost, to make sure you're not missing anything. As you do that, like one of the things that, you know, we'll talk about sort of areas that you see going forward, but what are some of the myths that you see that people probably even publicly talk about that you're like, hey, I just don't see credence to where people are advocating for people to spend time and effort.
