Although Yahoo! Local saves its best local features for their paying customers, they have a refreshingly simple advertising fee that leaves little to be desired if you know how to put their enhanced features to work for your practice. For a flat $9.99 per month, members have full access to Yahoo’s local advertisement program, including several additional options for promoting and customizing your site’s listing in Yahoo! Local search results. As reasonable as their advertising fee is, however, it’s worth taking a look at the different features that the program has to offer to see whether these enhanced options are things that your practice really needs.
Yahoo’s local advertisement program allows you to implement the following enhanced features on your practice’s Yahoo! Local listing:
- Add a search engine friendly description of your business
- Spice up your listing with your logo, photos and a catchy tagline
- Create an instant call to action with online coupons
While Yahoo! Local’s basic listings allow you to provide some basic information about your professional services, this data is not indexed by the actual search engine itself. With enhanced listings, you can incorporate your top long tail keyword from lesson one right into your local listing and immediately make it easier for potential clients to discover your practice.
If you compare a basic listing and a well-executed enhanced listing on Yahoo side by side, you’ll notice that basic listings look decidedly drab by comparison. If there is some heavy competition for business in your area, adding some tasteful images and a tagline that sparks the public’s interest to your profile is a great way to demonstrate your professionalism.
On a similar note, Yahoo! Local’s online coupon feature gives you the opportunity to get potential clients further along the buying process before they even make it to your site. Clients tend to stick around for the long term in most professional service niches, so offering a reasonable discount to all new clients who discover practice using Yahoo! Local is almost certain to pay off in the long run. Using an online coupon also creates a sense of immediacy to your listing that should inspire visitors to visit your site before moving onto other practice’s in your area.
The best part about using enhanced listings on Yahoo! Local is that they have made the billing process so simple. While you can potentially attract a high volume of targeted traffic using Google AdWords and Bing AdCenter, there is definitely a learning curve associated with leveraging pay-per-click advertising effectively. If you don’t have much hands-on experience using those tools, Yahoo’s flat fee advertising program will have you promoting you local listing on at least one search engine without the hassle of researching and bidding laser-focused keywords.