Get Local with Yahoo! Local

A useful marketing tip for those serving local communities and visitors is to submit their business details to Yahoo! Local. It is an initiative from Yahoo to help their users find things they need in their neighbourhood.

Yahoo! Local supplies the names and numbers of local services and businesses and displays information related to them. Its a kind of 'Yahoo! Yellow Pages'. As Yahoo! Local evolves, it hopes to provide expanded information to make its search results more comprehensive.

To try it out click on the "Local" tab at the top of yahoo.co.uk or just type www.uk.local.yahoo.com into the address bar of your browser.

Enter a search term like Website Design in the 'Search for:' field and Hastings in the 'Location:' field.

Importantly the top results displayed on Yahoo! Local will also appear above the organic results in the main Yahoo! results listings if a geographic reference is entered. Try the search phrase website design hastings on the main Yahoo! website for example.

Yahoo! gets its classified information from Infoserve Group plc who also manage Yahoo! Local’s sponsored advertising.

Now this means that once you have submitted your business to Yahoo! Local you may well get a call from an Infoserve employee offering to set up a sponsored listing for you. A sponsored listing will cost you if it is used to reach your website.

You ARE NOT obliged to take a sponsored listing although it may be something that interests you. I found my their sales pitch more educational and less hard sell. If you can spare the time, see if you can gleam any tips and suggestions. I learned for example that their are more searches on the term Website Design East Sussex than Website Design South East and so I have tweaked our website optimisation for east sussex accordingly.

To get your business into Yahoo! Local complete this simple form.