SES Chicago  Day Two  Local Session  #2 of 4.

YellowPages.com ($$$ URL!) “Yellow Pages” and the Walking fingers logo were never trademarked in the U.S. - yikes!  They want everyone to use them for “Plumber, Charlottesville VA”  of course.  Of course many people will go straight to Google, et al.

Local search investment is going up, up, up!  These guys have 4,500 sales reps talking to millions of local plumbers and dentists every year!  Barrier to entry for Alts:  Google, et al, have $$$ to invest in local to add to their product mix, but a start up may not have the money to get decent traction.

YellowPages.com feeds into Yahoo! Yellow Pages and AOL, etc. 

Selling clicks is *not* that key for YellowPages because many local business do not have a website yeet to click to!  Excellent point - very true.  So maybe a print ad would be better.

Interestingly, they approach the local dentist and they say, “How many quality leads do you want per month - what’s your goal and how many can you handle?’ and then YellowPages delivers that much traffic for $$ cost.  The dentist does not really care where the leads came from - PPClick, print, other, etc.

Mobile search is very young, SMS, WAP, Jaba downloads, iPhone app, but there are a mind numbing number of brands, phone models, carries, platforms, an on and on.  Mobile call conversions are very high and extremely localized.  PPCall. 

Now they have “ratings and reviews” with a rebuttal feature!  Now this I love!! It connects the merchant with the person that wrote the negative comment (the consumer can be anonymous, of course).  That disgruntled customer could then write a glowing review, “Hey, Joe’s plumbing really listens to their customers!”

[At AltSearchEngines, we connect commenters to the search engine when it seems appropriate and mutually beneficial, just happened this morning.]

Coming soon: video yellow page ads!  (Brings in Video Search)

End of session.  Lunch!

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