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According to TechCrunch, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com paid $3,850,000 for the YP.com domain when they purchased it from LiveDeal last month. Here’s the SEC filing.
So what does this mean for you? My guess is there was not a lot to the YP.com domain other than its ability to rank for different searches around the term “yellow pages”.
Here’s some data from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the avg. monthly search volume, cpc and est Google Rank of Yp.com for some of these terms:
yellow pages 6,120,000, $0.72, 16
yellowpages 1,000,000, $0.54, 10
yellowpages.com 450,000, $0.51, 11
yp 301,000, $0.59, 1
yellow page 165,000, $1.01, 12
www yellowpages 135,000, $0.60, 5
www yellowpages com 110,000, $0.55, 5
Assuming YP.com can get 1% of the monthly clicks from Google for these terms, these seven keywords alone could be producing more than $700K/yr in value to Yellowpages.com. On top of this I would expect to see some additional benefit to Yellowpages.com from linking from YP.com. I haven’t read the filing, but if YP.com had any kind of revenue/advertiser base, then this seems like a no-brainer deal for AT&T.
So what does this mean for you?
If you are reading this blog you likely are involved with a site that has the ability to rank for similar terms as YP.com either at a local or national level. The reason why local search is attracting so many players is because it consistently generates some of the highest CPMs in the business due to the targeted nature of the content/users. Compare this to the CPMs you could get on Facebook. Whether you are a national, regional or local player, there is still huge amount of this keyword territory that has yet to be staked out. What are you waiting for?
My friend Scott is a local boat dealer in Livermore, CA. One of the big annual events for his business is the Pleasanton Boat Show which usually takes place in early January. Unfortunately the show has been cancelled this year so Scott is now going to try some other nearby shows. Of course the SEO-obsessed look for an opportunity in every situation so herein lies the nugget of wisdom:
1. People who do not know that the show has been cancelled will be searching Google for information on the “pleasanton boat show” and “boat show pleasanton”.
2. People who know it has been cancelled will be searching Google for information on “pleasanton boat show cancelled” to find out why.
3. Per my post on trade show marketing and SEO, showing up for searches for these shows is a cheap and effective form of marketing.
4. Per this post, showing up for searches for cancelled shows could be just as cheap and effective.
Last year I started the Give A Little SEO for Christmas campaign to thank everyone who commented on the blog in 2007, and it’s that time of the year again. The idea is to throw a link to all of your commenters with their ideal keywords in the anchor text. It’s the least a blogger can do to show his appreciation to those who have even less of a life than he does and find that pseudo anonymous interactions with other human beings via Wordpress is the most efficient and painless way to connect with the rest of the species. Anyhow if you have a blog I recommend you take a few minutes this holiday seasons to throw some links to your peeps.
I’ll fill this list out over the next week or so, but in the meantime here are some of the Local SEO all stars:
Just got off the phone with a client who has some serious SEO issues. One of the big ones is that there are ten-year-old URLs still in Google’s index that nobody knew about. These URLs were put in place by people who are no longer at the company, and if I hadn’t done some creative searching, chances are they never would have known about them. Did I mention that these URLs were rendering exact duplicates of the entire site? I am thinking that could be a problem.
So my advice is to set up a document that everyone on the team can access and make someone responsible for updating it with every new URL type that you push live, or even that you push to a dev server (I’ve seen plenty of dev servers that are accessible to the search engine bots). It may not seem like such a big deal right now, but when your traffic tanks and you’ve got your SEO guy on the phone, presenting him/her with this list will likely help you all get to the root of the problem a lot faster, which will mean that you are more likely to have a job by the time the traffic comes back.
I run a cafe & catering company in San Ramon and just wanted to
share with you and other group organizers that I offer my
dining room as a meetup location 7 days a week for free with
the purchase of food (appetizers or meals).
If your are interested in booking, we seat up to 45 guests.
Give me a call.
Thank you,
Brianna Slaven
Thyme To Eat Cafe & Catering 2217-f San Ramon Valley Blvd.
San Ramon, ca 94583 925-837-2246
I guess some people might think this is kind of spammy, but I just thought it was kind of smart. I never would have known about Thyme to Eat Cafe otherwise, and now I actually might consider holding an event there.
Of course it might be helpful if Microsoft actually released the survey (or at least a press release about it) so we could see for ourselves. I guess we third tier bloggers are destined to forever be disintermediated.
When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack. There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the relationship it already has with small businesses, they can start to take both traffic and advertiser share away from the incumbents, even the start-up incumbents.
I thought it was time to check in with Greg Hartnett, President of BOTW, to see how they were faring. The short answer: pretty well. Here are the details:
LSG: Greg which local search sites do you think are doing a good job?
GH: I think Yahoo Local has the best platform but their organization has significant challenges and I think that has gotten in the way of them being able to innovate on it over the past few years. And you can’t count Google out. Google maps is pretty awesome, particularly the mash-ups.
GH: We licensed Localeze and mashed their data up with a number of other data sets we had. Then we noindexed the whole site except for NYC. We let Google index our NYC data first to make sure we didn’t have any problems with it and then we slowly opened up the rest of country market by market. It took about 2-3 days for Google to index all of our NYC data. It took about eight weeks to get the top 30 markets completely indexed. We have now opened up almost 100% of the site to the search engines.
LSG: How is the site different from BOTW.org?
GH: Well we do link the two where it is relevant such as from a NYC page on BOTW.org to a NYC page on BOTW Local. There are a lot of similarities, but while people think of BOTW.org as a huge site, we still only have about 113,000 pages in Google’s index. BOTW Local has 16.7 million business listings so as you can imagine it is a whole other beast.
LSG: How much traffic is BOTW Local getting from search at the moment?
GH: About 35K-40K uniques/day and we expect that to grow dramatically over the next year as we improve the site and of course the SEO.
LSG: How many businesses have claimed their profile so far?
GH: About 14,000, of which a good number have signed up for the premium service at $9.95/mnth. The premium service allows you to add more data to your listing.
LSG: What’s coming next?
GH: Pretty soon you’ll be able to add photos to your listing and we’re making a lot of improvements to the business’ dashboard. We’ll be adding social features like reviews, etc in 2009. We throw a lot of charity fundraisers so we are thinking that this might be a good way to get users involved in writing reviews, inviting friends, etc. So we’ll look into that. We also just launched a UK version of BOTW.
LSG: Any advice for my readers who are thinking of getting into the IYP space (you know who you are)?
GH: When we started BOTW we had another business that was generating a lot of cash so it was easy to support BOTW as it was getting off the ground. My advice is to have another way of making money so you can afford to focus on quality first.
LSG: Thanks Greg. For those of you who are looking to promote their biz on BOTW Local, you can add/edit your business here. Oh and one more question: Physical Graffitti or Led Zeppelin 1/2?
GH: That is a tough, tough call. Physical Graffiti is a more mature Zeppelin, with some truly incredible tracks. A double album covering the spectrum of LZ style. 1/2 though - what a dynamic couple of albums. Not only do they contain a handful of my all-time favorite tracks, but they bring me back to my school days and my introduction to rock ‘n roll. Though I truly did have to sit here and think about it, I’d have to go with 1/2.
Noa Gertin at Palore just pinged me with some real happy talk kind of news. According to their data, which they get from crawling local search sites, the search engine advertising spend for SMBs took a 50%+ hit in Sept/Oct 2008. Noa, if you’re reading this, how do you know this is SMB spend and not just overall ad spend? (e.g. if a few big brands which make up a nice chunk of overall spend cut their budgets, it could make it look worse than it is for SMBs if you are not breaking them out)
And here’s an eerily similar graph of NASDAQ performance to really cheer you up.
