Yahoo’s Local Push: SearchMonkey and PPC Targeting
There are a couple articles I published on Search Engine Land over the past few days that I think bear mentioning here for their meaning to small businesses. If you’ve already seen both of these articles, move along. 🙂
Yahoo Adds Local Content To Search Results Via SearchMonkey
What’s going on: All Yahoo web searchers are now able to see a lot of local business content in the SERPs without lifting a finger. The “SearchMonkey apps” for Citysearch and Zagat are now on by default, joining Yelp and Yahoo Local. I explain it on the SEL post, but it basically means that a small business with full and accurate listings on these local/social directories can get some extra exposure now in the Yahoo SERPs.
Yahoo Adds ZIP Code Ad Targeting
What’s going on: If you use Yahoo Sponsored Search, you can now geo-target your ads to specific ZIP codes. As with all geo-targeting, it’s not perfect. But it’s something that only Yahoo and Ask.com offer. (And who advertises on Ask.com?) It’s brain-dead easy to do, too — the screenshots on the SEL post are from my wife’s YSS account. Just supply the ZIP codes you want to target, and Yahoo will draw you the map to review before you submit the new geo-targeted settings.
I’m not going to advertise everything I write these days on SEL — just the “Small is Beautiful” columns and, as in this case, anything I think needs to be seen by the small/local business owners who read SBSM.
This is all great…
Now if only people would start using Yahoo to search! In all seriousness – what % of PPC marketers see any meaningful traffic from MSN or Yahoo?
We’ve had campaigns on Google, Yahoo and MSN for dozens of clients for a number of years and very few see anything in the way of significant traffic /conversions. The CPC also tends to be higher for comparable keywords – despite my perception of lower value traffic.
I have seen Yahoo demonstrate unexpected effectiveness in the finance category – no doubt due to the popularity of finance.yahoo.com and people that must lazily begin their search from that page.
It’s 5am… maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed?
Great post – keep them coming.
Ben
I’d say Google accounts for 70% with the rest picking up the scraps. Yahoo balked at a merger where they’d have made a huge premium in a sale to MS. I wonder how they feel about that now?