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August 10, 2006

Newspapers Getting Into Local Search Game

MediaNews Group, which bought the San Jose Mercury News from McClatchy, becomes the third newspaper group to employ a "guaranteed clicks" geotargeted search program for the local business market. Powered by WebVisible, which McClatchy is also using, the product is the essentially the same as what the yellow pages publishers have been selling for the past year or so.

These "guaranteed clicks" products offer a simplified version of SEM for the local market. Campaign set up and fulfillment is managed by the third party vendor (WebVisilble in this case). The chief value of these products is that they're simple to sell, simple to buy and have good margins. But fulfillment isn't always easy.

Here are the main companies offering versions of "guaranteed clicks" or "simplified search" (SEM or SEM+ SEO) to the local market through partner-aggregators:

Local Launch
WebVisible
Reach Local
Marchex/Traffic Leader
Leads.com (now owned by WebSitePros)
Matchcraft
ClickForward (now owned by YellowBook)
Inceptor (now owned by SuperPages)