Jeff Beard

Company: Localeze

Jeff Beard is the president and general manager of Localeze.  Prior to Localeze, Jeff  served as vice president of corporate development at TARGUSinfo, where he led the company through its acquisition of Amacai, now a wholly owned subsidiary of TARGUSinfo.  Jeff was a key player in Amacai’s 2001 launch and was primarily responsible for the operation and management of all business units. Prior to joining TARGUSinfo, he spent 13 years at Acxiom Corporation, where he held a variety of sales, sales leadership and product positions.

What is your role at Localeze?
As a  data and content management veteran, I am responsible for leading Localeze’s long-term strategic vision as well as driving growth, new-product and business development. In 2005, I led an initiative focused on building information products targeted at the local search industry. From this initiative, Localeze was created and has quickly become the largest online local search content management company, serving businesses search engines and ready-to-buy consumers.

What are the main services of Localeze?
Retailers who want to increase the online visibility of their brick and mortar locations, as well as service-oriented businesses rely on Localeze to enhance, optimize, manage and distribute their local business content to the largest local search engine network in the industry.  While most local business listings include only basic information such as business name, address, phone number and URL, Localeze enables businesses to create accurate, comprehensive listing profiles including keyword-rich content such as products, brands, services, specialties, qualifications, hours of operation and payment options, languages spoken etc.  This enhanced content increases the likelihood of businesses being found by consumers searching online for products and services with a specific want or need in mind.

Localeze also enables local businesses serving multiple industries to add listings under multiple business categories. Using a consultative approach, Localeze manages the process by offering expert advice and tools to help businesses optimize their local search engine listing content. Localeze distributes businesses’ directly enhanced content to over 85 major local search engine partners.

For local search engines, Localeze drives user loyalty by creating a better consumer experience through providing the most accurate and enriched listings for local search engines.  Localeze also creates new revenue opportunities for large search engine publishers as well as industry vertical and geo-local search engines through additional display advertising sales opportunities and through the utilization of Localeze’s broad content distribution network.

What makes Localeze different from other companies competing in your industry?
Localeze is the only company 100 percent focused on online local business content management.  We’ve built the largest local search engine distribution network in the industry, and are able to serve it through our established relationships with the largest number of national brands, local businesses and authorized channel partners.  These connections give us access to the most business verified and enhanced content in the local search ecosystem.

Additionally, we structure and organize content specifically for local search engine ranking and presentation, applying classification and content matching systems to link changing consumer search terms to the most qualified local businesses. By using Localeze, local businesses are able to enrich their basic content with critical information such as brands carried, specialties, and hours of operation, languages spoken and payment methods.  Other data aggregators don’t offer these kinds of listing enhancements.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.
With the support of TARGUSinfo’s visionary CEO George Moore and my entrepreneurial  spirit, Localeze was created as a division of TARGUSinfo in 2005 to capture the widely untapped online local search engine business content management marketplace. Three years later, Localeze is the largest online content management company serving businesses, local search engines and ready-to-buy consumers, and our senior management team comprises some of the top minds in the local search marketplace.

We have a rapidly growing network of local search engine partners and satisfied national brand and local business clients who have driven our continued growth and profitability. We also have a dedicated in house team of local search engine experts who are keenly focused on content quality, depth and broad, robust online distribution.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a partner like Localeze?
First, businesses should use a local search engine to query their company's name alongside a geo-modifier, to see if their listings appear, and how accurate and complete they are.  Searches should be conducted on both major search engine local sites like Google Maps® and Yahoo! Local ®and a few of other local search engines such as Yellowpages.com®, Superpages.com®, Shoplocal.com® or Openlist.com®.

Once they’ve gotten a sense of how their company is represented in local search engine results, the next step is to determine which engines accept submissions directly, then determine the necessary time and resources required to submit and then manage content across dozens of local search engines.  Any partner selected to outsource content management, should have distribution partnerships with majors like Yahoo! Local, as well as a long list of Internet Yellow Pages and other specialized online local search engines to give businesses maximum reach, ranking and visibility.

How do you keep your skills honed in this continuously changing environment?
As a company, our main goal is to become the most trusted online local business content source for local search engines and businesses.  We work towards this end by continuing to offer deeper, richer business-verified content, along with innovative tools to help our local search engine and channel partners provide more meaningful experiences for their advertisers and for consumers.  Beyond that, we will continue to extend and optimize content, adapting it to changing consumer search terms and behaviors.

What do you see as the future of the local search industry?  What will be the challenges; do you anticipate any drastic changes?
Local search content sources proliferating through channels including video, mobile and social media applications will not make things any easier for local search engines, local search applications or local businesses; all aimed at reaching and satisfying consumers. The evolution of the local search market place will also be driven by the migration of consumers from the print yellow pages industry, once valued at over $15 billion, to online local search.

As consumers make this move, the validity, accuracy, depth and keyword relevance of local websites, paid search campaigns and most importantly online businesses listings content will be directly related to delivering effective local search results to consumers.


Where do you see your firm in the next five years?
As the market matures, both the amount of business content generated and its velocity will increase.  It will become far more critical to be able to accurately integrate disparate local business content, verify it and perform functions that optimize and enrich it for local search engine consumption.

And as business content proliferates, the ability of local search engines to ensure content validation, accuracy and integrity, as well as to link changing search terms to individual businesses, will be directly related to their ability to deliver effective local results for businesses to the consumer.   Localeze will continue to serve as the center of the local search engine ecosystem and offer complete, trusted management of local search engine business content.