Well, obviously I would like to think that many many people out there in the WWW like to read my blogs, and I have had some reaction from people before, but my recent blog about Yahoo Sponsored Local Search seems to have caught the attention of some people.

I just had a thoroughly interesting and pleasant conversation with the CEO of Infoserve Steve Barnes, who had a couple of issues with what I wrote on the subject yesterday. He had come across my blog, and had obviously spent some time looking at our site to discover more about what Vertical Leap do, and the work that we do to get our clients more business to their websites.

Among the information that I was supplied by Steve, I have been told that there were 341,224 visitors using the word "Hotels" in this engine last month, an illustration of how important a prominent "sponsored" listing can drive traffic and enquiries to the site, as these listings appear not only in local areas, but in the Yahoo equivilent of Google's Onebox in the standard listings, including a contact phone number.

I suppose my beef with the lady who called me yesterday, was in trying to justify the expense across the number of hotels that I would have to initiate this with. I do actually think that such a listing would be beneficial at a "local" level and for smaller clients, indeed some directory listings are worth paying money for (just as long as you aren't purchasing said link to attempt to improve your search engine ranking - this is still considered a grey area as Craig recently discussed).

I've worked with many small businesses in the past that this kind of local reach could bring fantastic results for, and local search is still in a growth stage - it remains to be seen just how big an aspect of overall search that this will become.

However I found it hard to justify the outlay for over 40 hotels - yes, definitely valuable for small businesses, with or without a website. But the work that I am trying to do for this particular client is to achieve such rankings in a natural way, without having to pay for that listing. I think Steve's perspective on it, was that they actually are paying for that position by utilising Vertical Leap's service, which I understand. He seemed to be comparing our price with the price for 1 such listing in the directory, but if I do my job well for this website (which I work hard to always do), then we should be getting traffic from a wide variety of sources, of which Yahoo and Yahoo Local may be a small percentage.

I also have to admit, as I have worked almost exclusively in organic search over the last 18 months or so, that I have become cynical about some of the benefits that can come from Sponsored ads. Sometimes an open mind is required in matters that I am not so familiar with.

But another reason why I am perhaps slightly cynical of Yahoo and what it can deliver is that I have very rarely ever seen it supply more than 15% of traffic to any of my campaigns, no matter how well we rank for even the most competitive phrases.

The upshot of all of this, is that I may well recommend to my client that we implement some form of trial using this service. If I can convince them that such an expense may be beneficial to the site, then I may well be talking about this further in the future with my thoughts and findings as to what kind of a return can be gained through this medium. Watch this space