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.
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