Yell.com Partners With U.K. Home Vertical

The U.K. online Yellow Pages directory Yell.com has announced a partnership with IdealHomeShow.co.uk, giving the home improvement and garden trade show Web site access to Yell.com’s local business listings in related headings.

This agreement is a first for Yell.com, according to the company, and it appears to signal a new strategic direction toward syndicated Yell content into relevant partner sites in key vertical categories.

Here is a comment from Matthew Bottomley, director of new media product marketing for Yell.com.

“This is an exciting partnership between two great brands — people look to the Ideal Home Show to inspire them with ideas, and then come to Yell.com to find the local tradespeople who can turn their vision into reality. It is natural to bring these two things together.”

Mark Canon, the former Switchboard, AOL and Autobytel executive who now runs Yell.com, gave a keynote address at TKG’s recent Interactive Local Media conference in Santa Clara, California.

In his address, Canon talked about the importance of being a “good symbiot” and not focusing too much on owning every piece of the value chain. It is more important, Canon suggested, that the SMB content Yell gathers is distributed widely to drive more value for Yell’s customers. In particular, Canon argued that a cooperative relationship with Google was the smart play for a company like Yell, which has assets Google cannot or will not replicate (namely contact with SMBs) but cannot compete with Google for traffic.