Yodle CEO Court Cunningham, in a well received presentation at SMB Digital Marketing this week in Chicago, told attendees to constantly adapt to actual conditions in the marketplace, not what the “experts” tell us.

The gist of Cunnigham’s comments were that experts are too often conflicted by their limited access to data and doing what is convenient. Long term, adaptation happens along the lines of Charles Darwin: and of course, only the strongest survive. What really needs to be analyzed are what impacts the “three pillars of local success sales, service, and marketing ROI,” he said.

Experts for instance, would have you believe that you can’t link content back to your website without taking a hit from the search engines; that map optimization is a simple one time affair; mobile optimization only has an impact for restaurants; and single search terms are about as good as plural search terms.

But Yodle’s 50 data analysts – studying three million weekly search queries and other data linked to its 30,000 customer base – have found that content can be linked back without any real hit.

They also found that map optimization is a highly tuned issue caused by constant changes in the map alogorithms; mobile optimization has a major impact on a wide swath of sites; and plural search terms are much better than single search terms.

Mobile paid search, in particular, is critical for all businesses, drives great economics and should be treated as a unique outlet, said Cunningham.