UBL is one of many companies that deals in mass quantities of business info... think infousa, elocallisting.com, etc... I actually met and spoke with a rep from UBL at SMX Local in San Francisco last year.
Part of the argument all of these companies make is that they have trusted relationships with the major search engines as data providers. If you ever wonder where all of the local Google Maps / LBC data comes from, it is sources like this.
They have established relationships with the major engines and the selling point is to ensure that your local listing information is 'consistent' across all of the search providers.
They (and other such companies) will claim that paying them to list your local business information will increase consistency across many of the local listing sites: Google Local, Yahoo Local, and many, many other smaller local listing sites across the internet.
I believe that UBL was a newcomer to the game last summer at the time they presented at SMX, but there were others that did the same thing. They make their money by licensing out their listing data to these local listing sites/providers.
If you've already made good progress claiming local with G, Y and Bing/MSN local , I'm uncertain how beneficial this would be. On the other hand, for $30 per year if they update hundreds of data providers with nothing more than a link to your website, that could generate traffic from sources you may not already get.
Check out their
website, and click on the EVERYWHERE link to see the search providers that use their data. If you don't already have a presence on some of these sites, the backlinks may be useful if they are used. I think the main problem is that there is no 'guarantee' that their information will be considered authoritative and will be used everywhere as the search engines don't get data from a single source for LBC, they use LOTS.
Cathy may have some input, as she may have discussed some of these companies in her discussions with Mike Blumenthal regarding local search and Google LBC issues. He was also present at SMX Local last year and was on several panels with reps from UBL and other data providers.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, Steve
