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That is very odd that it is ranking that high. Using OpenSiteExplorer, it shows that rockymountainpatiofurniture.com only as 5 internal links. The other 2 links are blog comments. I looked and on Google, RMPF has almost 3000 indexed pages and after a 48% scan using Screaming Frog, the homepage has over 5406 internal inlinks. I can only assume we are not seeing all of the information related to this site. It appears to be pretty established and have a decent number of internal pages with unique content. That probably doesn't help much... but it does give you a little bit more information. Mike

UBL imo is unimpressive, and in fact now they actually resell Yext as part of their offering. I've been using Yext for some of my clients, but I'm not completely sold. It seems like a nice "shortcut" to getting listed quickly, but I think nothing beats manual link building. If your business runs a lot of specials. then Yext is great for pushing out updates quickly to all the listings at once. I think that's the biggest benefit to using Yext. But if you don't change your information or your specials often, then you might as well just build the citations manually once, instead of incurring an annual fee.

I used Yext late last year and they got me listed in a lot of directories. I can not tie it to an ROI though. I show up in search and I'm in the directories but, 100% of my business is referral.

I'm not sure I understand the question, but along the way  the original poster seems to be  suggesting that a mobile strategy should always and everywhere be a high priority for every business. I'm not sure I agree with that premise. I recently optimized for mobile the site of a client who mobile traffic has doubled to 25% in the last few months. Much of the site traffic is from 18-35 year old males who are affluent and educated...and access the site daily for updated content.  So it was kind of a no-brainer. We just rolled the mobile optimization into an overall site re-design. There is only one site. But another client is business-to-business. Users access the site only from work, during business hours, from Monday to Friday. It's a very tech un-saavy user basis, with over 65% on IE. Mobile traffic is so small it's hard to measure. The site is not optimized for mobile. We just did a site upgrade, without optimizing for mobile. I recommended we wait another year. That said, when building new sites from scratch these days, I would always optimize for mobile. As to the question of whether you should build a mobi version of a legacy site, my answer would mirror the one above: follow Google's recommendation and just have one site. I'm trying to think of a situation where it would make sense to launch a mobile version of a legacy site with identical content....but I can't think of one.

Google specifically states that having a single site that responds to mobile versus desktop (aka - 'responsive design') will help you just as much. Plus, you won't have to build two sites. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-seo-official-15264.html

Trying to create a CONSISTENT NAP info across ALL directories and local listings, as well as get some back-links to get some local SEO boost, in a time-and-price efficient way. Do not mind paying but if it a lot of duplicate directories, we figured it might make sure we pick the ones with least overlap and largest reach of quality directories.

Hi Yvonne, I believe the main reason most franchises go the way you've summarized is manageability. The alternative is to entrust all work to individual franchise owners, including not only their own websites/content, but also all of their Local SEO. Can individual franchise owners be counted on to know what they are doing writing optimized copy and creating violation-free Place Pages? Maybe they can, but more often than not, I'd bet the answer to that would be no. By maintaining control over everything that happens, you control quality. You can do just fine with Local if it's all managed from the top across the board. On the other hand, I empathize with your wish to try it a different way. Good stuff can happen if you decide to be different, but if you see something working for tons of similar business models, reinventing the wheel may not be the safest or most successful route to go.