Darren Shaw

Whitespark

Whitespark builds online tools and provides services that help businesses and agencies with local SEO. We're known for our Local Citation Finder, Local Rank Tracker, Citation Building & Audit Services, and Local SEO Consulting. Our team often collaborates with other industry leaders and frequently presents at top SEO & Marketing conferences in North America.

Founder

University of Alberta

Networking and system administration and operation, development and management of the relational databases, GIS database development, web site development and maintenance.

Research Computing Coordinator

Hi, I'm Darren! 👋

I've been doing web development and SEO for 27 years (yes, before Google existed)

A bit about me 👇
🔹 Founder of Whitespark: local SEO software and services.
🔹 Local SEO educator with 36,000+ newsletter subscribers, 8,000+ YouTube subscribers, and 2,000+ email course sign-ups
🔹 In charge of the annual Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, one of the most cited resources in local SEO
🔹 Speaker at local search conferences around the globe and contributor to SEO publications

Did you know that the Google API leak says that service areas are NOT used in the ranking algorithm? If you want to expand your ranking radius for real, today’s podcast episode contains some actionable tips:

- build entity strength
- get reviews that mention the locations you want to rank in
- earn unstructured citations (local blogs, sponsorships, etc.)
- write localized website content
- lean into your niche in your website and GBP content (you may not rank for “restaurant” all over your city, but you CAN rank for “cubano sandwiches”)

We discuss these ideas from Miriam Ellis’s new Search Engine Land article, plus:

- Ben Franklin Effect applied to review requests (Sam Knight)
- API Leak reveals that Service Areas are NOT a ranking factor (Claudia Tomina)
- Google Local Pack links to places tab with pagination bug (Barry Schwartz)
- GBP adds scheduling and multi-location publishing to Google Posts (Barry Schwartz)

The full episode is now up on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review and ask IZIPIZI to sponsor us 🙏 (jump to 17:01 for context)

Founder of Whitespark. I share local SEO tips and strategy. Lead researcher behind the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Get everything you need for better local SEO at whitespark.ca

Here’s what you should do now that Google has anonymous reviews…

1. Change how you ask for reviews:

If your business is in an industry where people may be sensitive to leaving a review under their real name (e.g. legal or medical services, psychiatry, counceling, finance), your review collection process just got easier!

When asking for a review, tell customers how they can use a pseudonym when writing it.

2. Monitor and back up your reviews:

Now that Google users can add, remove, and change their custom display name whenever they choose, it is more important than ever export your review history regularly in case Google decides to delete your legitimate reviews.

3. Read Allie Margeson’s new article to fully understand what this anonymity means for both businesses and customers.

Find it on whitespark . ca / blog

Dennis Yu

BlitzMetrics

Making software and tools for young adults and businesses that want to amplify their word of mouth marketing. If you're a university or conference organizer, we want to help your members and students, too.

Chief Technology Officer

Building tools for our future young leaders to drive results for business owners. Students get real job experience and get paid to work on companies they love, while developing business skills. Businesses buy QuickStart packages implemented by certified student analysts. Rigorous checklists and training ensure consistent performance.

Want to join us?

Data Geek

I love interviewing experts in their field--- extracting their know-how for our community to follow.  Reach out to stephanie@blitzmetrics.com to book.

Host of the CoachYu show

ChiroRevenue

Adweek

I write articles showing real-world Facebook strategy using actual brand data.

Contributor for SocialTimes

Social Media Examiner

I write articles discussing social ads strategy.

Contributing Writer

Social Media Club

I contribute content that pertains to social media strategy.

Tweak Your Biz

I write startup and business management articles focused on internet marketing goals and interviews with influential people.

3Q Digital, a Harte Hanks Company

Contribute articles based on different social advertising strategies and tips.

Business 2 Community

I write about advertising, social media, and overall general business advice

Yahoo!

Technical Marketer

I help successful founders scale what's already working via the DOLLAR A DAY Strategy-- courses, coaching, and done-for-you implementation

CEO of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company which partners with schools to train young adults.  We offer courses, implementation, and consulting.

My personal mission centers around mentorship from my experience with helping people from all walks of life grow their expertise in digital marketing, sharing his insights from managing campaigns for enterprise clients like The Golden State Warriors, Nike, and Rosetta Stone.

I help digital agencies grow, serving doctors and real estate agents as fractional CTO.

I'm an internationally recognized lecturer in digital marketing and have spoken over 730 times in 17 countries, spanning 5 continents.

Featured in: The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, CNN, CBS Evening News and co-authored “Facebook Nation” – a textbook taught in over 700 colleges and universities.

ChatGPT ads are coming, and most of us aren’t ready.

~800M people use ChatGPT every week. Only ~35M pay. 

That’s around $13B in 2025 revenue… while OpenAI burns billions and stares at a $1.1T+ hardware bill.

Sam Altman isn’t building a charity.

ChatGPT is an aggregator, like Google or Facebook: it sucks in everyone’s content, reshuffles it, and owns the user relationship. More users → more data → more compute → better recommendations. 

That’s why there’s a free tier, a browser, and early shopping tests.

The conversations you and I are having, plus memory, are the new ad signal.

User: “My dishwasher is leaking – what should I do?”

ChatGPT: asks a few questions, then:

 “This is probably a failing inlet valve. You can DIY it, or I can connect you with a vetted local repair company that can be there tomorrow.”

That’s not a banner. That’s a paid recommendation.

Advertisers will happily pay 5–10% of a booked job instead of $50 per click. No more writing 10 headlines, managing 1,000 keywords, or babysitting bids. The system can optimize on the fly, including post-click flows, landing pages, and follow-up.

Agencies living off mechanical implementation are cooked. 

The ones who actually understand strategy and brand (looking at you, Dan Antonelli) will be fine.

“SEO experts” and ad agencies will argue:

“You still need content, links, and technical SEO.”
“You can’t just let a model handle creative and targeting.”

Cool. They can keep defending their dashboards.

Here’s what actually matters if you’re a real business:

1. Reputation beats tactics.

 Recent, detailed reviews. Real case studies. Before/after photos. Mentions on other sites, podcasts, and associations. When ChatGPT has to pick one roofer, dentist, or appliance tech, it will ask: “Who consistently makes customers happy?”

2. Make your entities strong.

 Your brand, people, locations, services = entities in a knowledge graph, not just keywords. Clean NAP, schema, consistent profiles across Google, LSA, social, and directories. If the AI can’t clearly identify you, it can’t recommend you.

3. Feed the system better ingredients.

 Publish your wins. Turn jobs and customer stories into text, photos, and video on the open web. The model will do the copy and targeting; you’re responsible for the pantry.

4. Stop chasing trickery.

 “Secret targeting” and keyword voodoo get flattened by a model that sees everything. ChatGPT ads won’t reward whoever yells the loudest or cranks out random blog posts. They’ll reward strong reputation, clean entities, and verifiable proof you’re legit.

Whoever has the best ingredients wins. Not whoever has the most tricks.
If you’re brave, ask ChatGPT today:

 “How well would I fare if ChatGPT ads went live right now?”

 Then ask it to help you strengthen the signals around you (the founder), your local service business, and your city—and get an AI-savvy young adult, whether one we’ve trained or one of your own, to help you execute.

Making the phone ring for local service businesses via SEO-- done for you and training via agencies that specialize in local categories. Search engine engineer, author, speaker.

So happy!  Just hit 500,000 views on my 14 week old YouTube channel.

People are staying 7-9 minutes on my videos-- then watching more episodes, and subscribing.

They tell me they've been consuming my content and now would like my help in improving their local SEO and seeing if their son is a fit for our training program.

What's crazy is that these videos are raw and unscripted.  Every week I talk about a particular topic in-depth, sharing specific examples from my experience, drawing out detailed diagrams from a blank whiteboard.

So it takes me zero extra time-- no editing, no thumbnails, no fancy processing, no magic software.  But we do have agents we've built within our ChatGPT Business account that all our team members can use.  

And we continue to train them-- the human managers and the AI agents-- to analyze performance, make recommendations, boost posts, fix client websites, and all sorts of tasks within our 1,000 Task Library.

The more work we get done, the more success stories for local service businesses (mostly roofers, plumbers, landscapers, and high ticket local service businesses) we have to share as whiteboard videos-- and the more data our agents have to train on.

I'm convinced that effective "marketing and sales" is not door to door, cold outreach, or clever marketing, but is.... 

..a by-product of your crew doing great work, documenting it for all to see, and running Dollar a Day ads for the algos to seek out similar customers.

Thus, creating this virtuous circle of more experience to share that allows social media, Google, and ChatGPT to extend what's already working, so long as you put a dollar in the machine.

The same dynamics apply to YouTube, Facebook, LLMs, X, your website, or any AI-powered system-- which is all of them.

AI is not a democratizing force-- it's helping the great service providers increase their market share at the expense of the folks who resist change.

Which camp are you in?

Some guy commented on my Google Knowledge Panel post, saying that you could do it yourself for free.

He is 100% right.

The smart folks know that everything we do, you can do it yourself for free.

Think of all the money you’ll save, say the strugglers, when you can learn how to do it all yourself!

That’s why we publish all our detailed SOPS, so these people can disqualify themselves from our services, which appear “expensive” to them.

Perhaps you are frustrated by folks who think you’re “too expensive”?

They’ve not your ideal clients.

Our ideal clients gladly pay a premium to save years of mistakes and pain in trying to figure things out themselves.

The folks who clip coupons at the grocery store— we are not trying to convince them we can do it cheaper than some dude on Upwork.

I've spent a billion dollars boosting Facebook posts.

This is the simple way to not screw it up.

Let me show you how to kill losers and amplify winners.

Imagine a stadium with 121,000 people all watching David Carroll perform.

That's exactly what's going on right now on YouTube.

And these are not 121,000 random people-- but the digital marketers and home service business owners that follow him and I.

David is sharing how he grew a massive business from nothing-- not selling anything.

The audience is buying nothing, but later they remember this when they are making marketing decisions.

Your reputation is everything.

200,000 additional views in Google searches last month-- zero effort on my part.

All from repurposing existing videos (Zoom calls and podcasts) into blog posts and YouTube.

Is your AI Apprentice (your child or one of our young adults) directing ChatGPT (in agent mode in Atlas) to enhance the visibility of your home service business?

We publish the SOPs and videos for free, while offer a one year paid coaching program for $7,500 (for the year, not per month).

Jose was extremely frustrated, paying $2,500 every month for SEO.

He called me to analyze performance, which took me 9 minutes.

We instantly saw the site ranked for almost zero keywords, generated nearly zero traffic, and had damage from spammy links and AI-generated pages.

Yet he was getting smokescreened with heaps of technical nonsense.

And he was too nice to ask for a refund or cancel — like most home service business owners.

So I created this video for him on how to fire your digital marketing agency, step-by-step, including the right response for every common trick they play.

You might benefit too — even if you don’t have a young adult as your AI apprentice or a transparent agency in mind.

https://lnkd.in/gDyXgKHc

The majority of "rank on AI" peddlers are just SEO salesmen hopping on the latest trend, trying to trick plumbers and dentists.

There is so much good, but separating the wheat from the chaff is frustrating.

I made this video to help our friends cut through the nonsense, so you can easily spot what is real-- even if the self-proclaimed SEO and AEO experts loudly insisting they have the cure for all ailments.

By the time you're done watching this video, you'll make the SEO hucksters red in the face.

And then apply common sense each time you hear a breathless new claim-- to examine it for the 5 signals I explain.

Here's our "Black Friday" deal...

If you have a young adult who wants to become an AI practitioner making the phone ring for local service businesses.

We have a group coaching program led by me and experts I've hand-picked, where we together work on real clients.

Could be your business with your son as the AI apprentice, or if you're the young adult, we will assign you projects.

We meet on Thursdays at 2 pm PST and coordinate in a private Facebook group, helping each other.

We pay for their OpenAI business (teams) level access, which includes API usage credits and the other tools we've built and bought for our apprentices.

Investment is $7,500 for an entire year, but through Monday, it's $2,500.

DO NOT proceed if you aren't committed to getting the work done, need constant hand-holding, are not comfortable learning new tools, have a history of jumping around between programs, don't have at least 5 hours a week, aren't willing to interview others on podcasts, aren't in the United States, or are doing something other than local service businesses.

We want the RIGHT people in our program, since these folks mentor the next groups.

Go here to look at examples of who is kicking butt and to find out more:

Open article: AI Apprentice Program by highriseinfluence.net

I feel like Mary Henderson is my long-lost sister, as she's been there for me for many years.

Despite the many Zoom calls and engaging here on LinkedIn, we've never physically met before.

So she's flying all way to the United States from Australia in 2026 and we're together going to interview people who are experts in their field, whether or not they've learned how to package their many years of corporate expertise into high ticket coaching and consulting (which is what she's #1 at here on LinkedIn).

Want to be interviewed by Mary and me in your city?

Open article: Mary Henderson: The Wisdom Economy Is a Blue Ocean by dennisyu.com

Mary Henderson: The Wisdom Economy Is a Blue Ocean

Here's the real reason your blog posts get zero traffic-- and how to fix it.

https://lnkd.in/gYWGTdef

Open video: The Real Reason Your Blog Posts Aren’t Ranking on youtube.com

The Real Reason Your Blog Posts Aren’t Ranking

Notice that Jack Wendt DOES have a Google Knowledge Panel.

But the SEO tool (Ahrefs in this case), shows zero keywords for his personal brand site, even though we know that's not true from Google's own data (search console, analytics).

Remember that SEO tools are approximating Google SEO results-- they are not exact.

They cannot be exact, since they'd have to build a replica of Google's infrastructure (not possible, even with a trillion dollars) or convince Google to share the data (impossible, too).

Yet this estimated data is still useful, just like marketing data-- since making decisions requires only directional accuracy, unlike accounting, which must match to the penny.

It's easy to obsess over any metric from estimated data-- people tend to have their favorites-- Domain Rating, keywords ranked, backlinks, etc...

The mark of expertise is knowing how to use actual data (CRM, GA, call tracking, revenue) together with approximated data (3rd party analytics, surveys, industry research).

Just because Google's Knowledge Graph API won't return every single result doesn't mean it's not incredibly helpful to help us build our personal and company brands.

Lane Houk is 100% right about how he can destroy his reputation in 5 minutes (see his signature line).

But he didn't expect that attacking me would backfire so spectacularly or that his own words and actions were what brought his downfall.

I made this video at his request, but also to show you why reputation is so important-- and how AI is a multiplier of that.

https://lnkd.in/gUNnUcXh

taplio

The Battle

Darren Shaw

Dennis Yu

Followers

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Performance ScoreDarren Shaw's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDennis Yu's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Darren Shaw

Dennis Yu

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Darren Shaw's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDennis Yu's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDarren Shaw's LinkedIn Performance