I had a phone call from a Yahoo saleswoman this morning, who had been referred to me by one of my clients to discuss the possibility of us using their Sponsored Local Search offering. The client in question has over 40 hotels, which Yahoo was attempting to convince me of the benefits of signing up each hotel at approximately £300 per listing (for 6 months), and for a limited number of targeted phrases.

So lets have a look at the Yahoo Local interface:

In all honesty, it looks much the same as most of the other local interfaces that I am familiar with. There is a map, there are a number of listings, and unsurprisingly there are sponsored links at the top of these.

Comparing this with the Google local interface, there is similar information being displayed, the main difference is that there are more listings on the Yahoo SERP and more Map on the Google Local search. Personally, I like the look and feel of the Google interface, but it is perhaps because I am more familiar with it. (I've blogged in the past about how easy it is to submit to Google Local)

There are sponsored links here too, but I suspect that these are PPC ads (although I am not 100% certain). 

I asked the Yahoo sales lady what kind of return of investment we could expect for this, as over 40 hotels at £300 for 6 months would work out at about £24k for a years listing. Its the same as most other organic search industries however, and she couldn't promise/guarantee that we would get any clicks.

However this is far more than it would cost to employ Vertical Leaps Organic search engine marketing for a year, which I have to say is much more likely to deliver traffic and conversions than mere sponsored listings in a local search engine.

I started asking some difficult questions at this point, in terms of "would that money not be better invested in PPC, where we are guaranteed to get some clicks and visitors to the site for such a substantial investment?" and "what will this really deliver that a free listing won't?".

I was told that the free listing, which is supplied by Infoserve isn't really worth doing, and that you get what you pay for. Now, this makes me think: if you dont get traffic from a free listing, it suggests to me that a sponsored listing on that page is unlikely to deliver much, if any more.

I can see the benefit of a smaller business promoting in one locality, but for my client this represents a substantial investment, without any real assurances that anything will be delivered from this.

I was also shown how Yahoo are introducing something similar to Google's onebox. Ok, well this is good, the sponsored listings are also appearing here in a stripped down form, but in my opinion and from my experience at present Yahoo doesn't have a large enough share of the search market to make it valuable for us to pursue this:

I did make the mistake of comparing a number of these services to their Google counterparts, to which I was told - "some of our local directory listing pages are now appearing in the Google index." If I worked for Yahoo, I would not want to be shouting about how this listing is appearing in a competitors results, as a potential prospect, I needed to be told by Yahoo what benefits Yahoo can give me from this.

I think I may have unsettled this poor sales lady, as she had expected to be talking to the marketing manager of this company and not a search professional. However, the questions that I raised, I really felt were important, and I didn't really receive any answers that satisfied me, certainly not convincing me to recommend my client uses this service.

She asked what the next stage would be and whether or not we are interested. I have done so more research into this now, and when she calls me back next week, I'm afraid to say that I will not be recommending this service to my client at this time. Who knows, I may be following up this blog next week depending on how this is received.