YP has made a deal to include Goodzer‘s enhanced local services data across 3,000 business categories on YP.com and YP’s mobile app. The move is designed to improve the value of YP’s owned and operated digital properties to merchants and consumers.

Consumers will now find more content within the YP environment when the conduct local searches, finding menu items and pricing information pulled from Goodzer’s data, for example. Merchants will have their presence on YP’s sites enhanced with rich local data. The end game for YP is more traffic to its owned and operated properties.

Goodzer was founded in 2010 a source for hyper-local retail data — helping consumers find products in local stores. In July, the company announced a push into local services, which expanded the number of locations that Goodzer had data on from 500,000 to 2.5 million. The move also greatly enhanced Goodzer’s attractiveness to partners like YP that hail from the services-heavy Yellow Pages industry. YP has 20 million businesses listed on YP.com.

“By teaming up with Goodzer, YP solidifies its position as an effective search leader by developing industry-leading digital solutions for consumers,” said YP CTO Darren Clark in a statement.

The deal is a boon for Goodzer. CEO Mike Wilson, himself a former Yellowbook executive, noted this in a statement about the deal.

“Working with YP will allow Goodzer to not only substantially expand our reach, but also make it easier for consumers to engage with local businesses,” said Mike Wilson, CEO of Goodzer. “Combining our enhanced local product and service data with YP’s scale will allow us to further deliver a better user experience for consumers while supporting the continued growth of local businesses.”

Investing in content is a critical strategic decision for a player like YP. Directory companies worldwide have found much of their digital growth in recent years from lower margin products like search engine marketing, while IYP revenue has been flat or declining. Building organic traffic on owned and operated properties is a path to profitable digital growth.

YP has clearly been focused on the consumer experience, more so than many of its directory peers. A case in point was the recent expansion of the My Book feature, which allows consumers to share YP.com content (lists, etc.) with their friends.

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YP has unveiled a new version of its mybook feature on YP.com, making the tool more social by enabling users to share their mybook content with friends via email, SMS and social media.

Mybook is a tool that allows users to organize local business information into customized categories like “Date Night,” “Home Improvement” or “Vacation Ideas.” Mybook users can tap into these stored lists of local business wherever they are, on the desktop or on a mobile device. Mybook also offers expertly curated lists, such as “Charming Hotels in Los Angeles.”

The idea behind mybook is to drive higher frequency user behavior, which ultimately builds the YP bolsters the YP brand drives more value for its advertisers. By adding social sharing capability, YP over time can create much more of a curated search experience, where users can tap into the recommendations of people they know by accessing their lists. It’s an experience that will feel much more Yelp-like than the original rather sterile online Yellow Pages search experience.

“The updated mybook experience is a smarter way to connect people with local businesses and a new approach to local search overall – one that combines a beautiful interface, endless opportunities for customization, and access to over 20 million local business listings across the US. By continuing to evolve the mybook experience, we’re giving people a better way to get things done, fast,” said YP CTO Darren Clark in a statement.

The company is promoting the new release with a five city “food truck” tour where consumers can learn about the feature and download the YP app. The truck is making the rounds in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco and Seattle (all of which are important markets for YP ).

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Coming on the heels of its big content deal with Yahoo, Yelp has inked a strategic agreement with directories giant YP to use the vast YP sales force to sell its inventory. The deal expands Yelp’s sales reach while at the same time exposing YP advertisers to Yelp’s large and engaged base of consumer traffic.

We spoke with Mark Ugar, YP’s VP of business development, who said the deal was comparable to what YP already does with other local search players, including Citygrid and Dex Media.

“In this new world, YP advertisers will be able to manage their presence on Yelp,” Ugar said. He wouldn’t get into the specifics of how this would work, though he acknowledged this would be a premium level product for YP advertisers. The advantage for YP advertisers is convenience, getting their presence on both platforms managed through a single source.

The big difference is Yelp’s enormity as a consumer facing local search brand. In a recent post on Yelp’s blog, the company boasted of passing the 100 million uniques (worldwide) in a single month milestone in January. This figure that doesn’t even include traffic from the 9.4 million mobile devices carrying the Yelp app.

YP’s appeal to Yelp is pretty obvious. With 4,000 local sales people, YP is the player to beat in terms of local sales coverage.

Ugar said the deal will go live sometime over the next few months. He expects the deal to be just the beginning of a long term partnership between YP and Yelp.

“This opens up a lot of possibilities in local search,” Ugar said. When asked to elaborate, he demurred. “We will let you speculate on what those can be.”

So, taking that challenge, the most ambitious possibility to speculate is a combination of the two companies. In this age where everyone is trying to achieve maximum scale, no merger possibility should be dismissed out of hand. The combination would on balance be more complementary than overlapping. Another less bold avenue is deeper content integration, similar to Yelp’s recent deal with Yahoo, which our senior analyst Abid Chaudhry addressed on BIA/Kelsey’s most recent Analyst Roundtable.

“Neither deal reflects a change in strategy. The Yahoo deal was about surfacing more of Yelp’s rich local content in other places consumers might be looking for it, and follows on the heels of similar content deals with Apple, Bing, and car manufacturers,” said Vince Sollitto, Yelp VP of Communications.

“The YP deal is about Yelp gaining access to YP’s advertiser base by letting YP sell a basic enhanced profile on Yelp as part of their multi-platform ad network; this helps YP expand their ad network distribution and provides richer content for Yelp consumers. Yelp is happy to work with third parties that can help share more content with consumers or expose more businesses to the reach and benefits of Yelp.”

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AT&T has finalized the sale of 53 percent of its Yellow Pages operation to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital, which has launched YP Holdings LLC. The new company will be led by newly appointed CEO David Krantz, who had been running AT&T Interactive, the digital arm of AT&T’s directories business.

The remainder of the leadership team was not announced but is said to include executives from the Directory Operations and Interactive wings of the business, as well as representatives of the buyer.

YP remains the world’s largest directory organization with revenues of $3.3 billion in 2011, about 30 percent of which come from digital.

The new company has a number of decisions to make, including whether to merge the Advertising Solutions and Interactive business units. The common branding YP suggests that decision may already have been made. Cerberus is likely to take its time with any big decisions on the organization, but it will probably move quickly to focus on costs.

More long term, the company needs to decide if it wants to continue investing in product development or focus more on establishing a “trusted advisor” relationship with its mainly small-business advertisers and help them acquire new customers and manage existing ones.

The deal’s completion follows AT&T’s Q1 earnings release, which showed some signs of improvement in the Yellow Pages revenue picture.

In the current environment, improvement comes in the form of a lower rate of decline. AT&T’s Q1 Yellow Pages results were revenues of $744 million, down from $868 million in Q1 2011. This works out to a 14.3 percent decline. In Q1 2011, the decline was 16.6 percent. In Q4 2011, AT&T shed from 15.7 percent from the Advertising Solutions business and 16.3 percent for the full year.

AT&T didn’t offer any color on the Q1 results nor did it disclose digital revenues, as it did in all quarters through 2011. We can expect much less transparency on the former AT&T directories business going forward.

The slowing of revenue loss seems to have come at the expense of margin. Q1 EBITDA for the directories business was $197 million, down a whopping 33.4 percent. The publisher’s EBITDA margin fell to 26.5 percent, from 34.1 percent in Q1 2011.

We’ve been following the adventures of AT&T pretty closely. Take a look at some of our recent posts on this topic:

For Better or Worse, AT&T Deal Sets Bar for Yellow Pages

Is It a Done Deal for AT&T’s YP Business?

AT&T Opens Door to YP Sale

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