Redesigns Aplenty

This week saw a healthy dose of Web site redesigns and feature enhancements. After Citysearch’s landmark relaunch on Wednesday, Superpages.com has redesigned its search page (via Greg Sterling). Yell.com also earlier in the week launched a new look and feel to its homepage, and AOL last week unveiled a new homepage design.

Local.com meanwhile rolled out new enhancements to its search engine results pages (SERPs) including new sorting, drill down and filtering tools (notable, enhancements, although not a full blown redesign).

This is one of many recent announcements for Local.com, coming days after it launched its Local Verified ad placement product (an annual fee-based paid placement product) and weeks after the LocalPromote landing page product launch.

Local.com is on a roll and has come a long way in making its SERPs more user friendly and elegant. This has also included a move away from banner ads to a more text ad-oriented SERP. Yesterday’s announced improvements further this evolution and should help company continue to gain user appeal.

On the advertiser side, LocalPromote will bring more small businesses online — in line with the Webification trend that is driving a lot of product development in the local search space. It’s an attractive landing page tool that makes it easier to establish an online presence for the majority of small businesses that aren’t inclined to go out and build or commission a Web site.

Think of it as online training wheels for this sizable portion of the SME marketplace. This should help Local.com bring more small businesses online and, importantly, expand the pool to which it can upsell a growing stable of ad products and formats.

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Related: A new Kelsey Group report will be out early next week (sub req.) that will take a closer look at Citysearch’s recent moves to bolster its content and generally reposition itself in many ways.