When they first launched in 2005, the independent sales channels were almost entirely about reselling search and YP ads. SMBs showed confusion over the value of these campaigns however, and it didn’t help that Google (and its lower margins) dominated the mix.

Since then, the independents have gone in somewhat different directions, as more players such as Local Edge have come in (and at least one major player, WebVisible, has dropped out.)

The independents continue to keep the core reselling models, adding display to the mix. But they have also worked to reduce churn and earn monthly fees by engaging their users via such channels as social media, landing pages and deals.

ReachLocal announced a major new effort last week, adding a marketplaces and services leads component. Moving into the world of Home Advisor (ServiceMagic), consumers can now use Reach to hire and pay for recommended service companies.

Today, Yodle announced an equally large move with the acquisition of Lighthouse, a highly developed Customer Relationship Management solution that puts Yodle in a DemandForce type setting. Lighthouse has several thousand customers, which will be added to Yodle’s base of 30,000 customers. Lighthouse CEO Brian Smith now becomes Yodle’s VP of Product and Marketing for Lighthouse 360.

Like DemandForce, Lighthouse has been especially active with Dentists, and is building its vertical outreach from there throughout 2013. This acquisition expands Yodle’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform offering, which now accounts for nearly half of the company’s revenue.

In a press release, Yodle CEO Court Cunningham noted that marketers have traditionally “siloed acquisition and relationship marketing; Yodle is now breaking down that wall as a result of acquiring Lighthouse and will be the first in the industry to optimize SMB lead generation based on actual transactions.”

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham and Home Advisor CEO Chris Terrill are among the featured speakers at Leading in Local March 18-20 in Boston.

The post Yodle Buys Lighthouse, Boosting Relationship Marketing Efforts appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham, in a well received presentation at SMB Digital Marketing this week in Chicago, told attendees to constantly adapt to actual conditions in the marketplace, not what the “experts” tell us.

The gist of Cunnigham’s comments were that experts are too often conflicted by their limited access to data and doing what is convenient. Long term, adaptation happens along the lines of Charles Darwin: and of course, only the strongest survive. What really needs to be analyzed are what impacts the “three pillars of local success sales, service, and marketing ROI,” he said.

Experts for instance, would have you believe that you can’t link content back to your website without taking a hit from the search engines; that map optimization is a simple one time affair; mobile optimization only has an impact for restaurants; and single search terms are about as good as plural search terms.

But Yodle’s 50 data analysts – studying three million weekly search queries and other data linked to its 30,000 customer base – have found that content can be linked back without any real hit.

They also found that map optimization is a highly tuned issue caused by constant changes in the map alogorithms; mobile optimization has a major impact on a wide swath of sites; and plural search terms are much better than single search terms.

Mobile paid search, in particular, is critical for all businesses, drives great economics and should be treated as a unique outlet, said Cunningham.

The post SMB Digital 2012: Yodle’s Cunningham Takes on ‘The Experts’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

ReachLocal went public today, raising $54.6 million on the Nasdaq from the sale of 4.167 million shares at $13 each. The share price had been sharply cut from earlier hopes of $17 to $19 given pessimistic market conditions. But the offering closed at $14.98 a share, up 15 percent in a sharply down day for the Street.

Whether prices hold up and lead to IPOs from similar SMB ad resellers/engagement companies such as WebVisible, Yodle and Orange Soda remains to be seen.

One complaint about all of them is that they’re low margin, high cost players, especially given their needs for large sales forces. In recent comments to the IAB, Jordan, Edmiston Group Co-President Tolman Geffs characterized ReachLocal as a vertically integrated play that only leaves 7 percent of its revenues to support its product and platform, after spending 55 percent on consumer traffic and 38 percent on sales and marketing.

But Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says that comments like Geffs’ totally miss the point of the business. “It isn’t about percentage. It is about dollars and cash flow,” he says. The margins are not dissimilar to major companies like Amazon. Amazon’s margins are 3.5 percent, but it brings in $1 billion a year. Cunningham cautions, however, that Yodle has no immediate plans to go public.

The post ReachLocal IPO Raises $54.2 Million appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The Berry Co., the SMB sales giant with 260,000 SMB clients, has partnered with Yodle for Web site creation and search engine marketing and optimization. The deal gives Yodle access to Berry’s 42-state reach and 885 print publications. Yodle, which is in something of a horse race with SMB resellers such as ReachLocal, WebVisible, Marchex and others, currently has a presence in 25 markets.

Berry, which calls itself “your local leads expert,” was sold to Local Insight Media last year. It is also an authorized resellers for AT&Ti’s Yellowpages.com, so it is essentially going to be splitting its sales products. SMBs will be offered online listings and video advertising from Yellowpages.com, and Web sites and SEO/SEM with Yodle. Berry is also an authorized reseller for Google AdWords.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the deal with Berry, Ma Bell’s legacy sales company, has been “a long time in the making.” Tests began in May last year, and the arrangement is now live in some markets, with “methodical, region-by-region” rollouts likely to be completed by the end of summer. He also notes that Berry now becomes its largest partner, but that Yodle is private labeling solutions with “four or five” other companies as well.

The post The Berry Co. Picks Yodle for Web Sites, SEO/SEM appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure to their Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For $400 a month, with six-month initial contracts, Yodle Organic is set to pump up its clients’ organic search rankings. It will provide personalized consultations, design and code Web sites to maximize search rankings; help create and syndicate video; distribute local business profiles to search sites and directories; and provide a dashboard that allows SMBs to measure goals.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the timing feels right. “SEO’s price-per-lead and price-per-click is substantially lower than SEM. But it isn’t ‘either-or.’ They complement each other,” he says. “SEO takes time to build your site so it becomes visible and builds authority in the eyes of the search engines. It is about building equity in a brand that is long lasting.”

The challenge is to properly scale the effort for each client and make money — Yodle gets an average of about $1,000 per month from its 7,000 paid search clients. “No one has productized and automated and put clear accounting” around something like this, he says. But “we’ve been building Web sites for three years. We’re experts in automation.”

Still, it is an ongoing experiment as Yodle works to get clients non-paid traffic in such new areas as maps, article sharing sites and even Google’s 7 Pack. “We look at these things as organic distribution,” says Cunningham.

Content production is probably the biggest question mark for Yodle (and for any company entering this space). Out of the gate, Yodle is using a combination of external contributors, internal editors and curated content from other sources. It hopes to provide at least 10 fresh pieces of content a month to each client.

The post ‘Yodle Organic’ Focuses on Boosting Search Rankings appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.