One of the most requested features we have received over the last year has been to allow business owners to add a new business or claim their existing business page on Matchpoint.com.

Well, today I’m pleased to announce that the wait is over. Business Owners can now list their business for FREE or claim their existing business page on Matchpoint.com.

Lots of other yellow page and directory sites offer free listings, but I think we are taking a very different approach in what we are offering business owners. While most other sites want to charge business owners for enhancements like adding their logo, coupons, and photos, we are offering all business owners their own enhanced web page complete with all the trimmings for FREE. That’s right, add your logo, add your business specialties, lists of products, messaging, and discounts you offer, all for FREE.

As a reward, businesses that add content to their page will appear higher up in our search results!

This doesn’t mean that your businesses will appear at the top of results (keep reading for how to get placed there), but it does mean that the more content you add, the better your ranking will be.

But that’s not it, not even close.

Content is important, but we also wanted to provide the maximum number of ways for people to contact and connect with businesses. That’s why every business page on Matchpoint.com now contains three easy ways to contact a business:

• Web site link – allows users to just click over to view the business’s web site.
• Phone number – we don’t hide this like some other sites do. Our users can easily call the business on the phone.
• Contact via E-mail – this built-in contact form allows users to ask the business a question, request a quote/proposal or appointment times all via e-mail.

Also, business pages now also include built-in action buttons that make it easy for people to connect a businesses to their friends and contacts on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. If you play your cards right, your business could get some serious exposure from this.

So, at this point you might be thinking that with all these free features and benefits it’s a “no brainer” for a business owner to sign up and setup their FREE business page. We agree.

But wait a second, there’s more…

Once you’ve added or claimed your business page, you can now opt into Matchpoint Promote – our paid offering that, for as little as $25, gives a business increased exposure on Matchpoint.com and additional features such as:

• Top placement in Matchpoint search results!
• Inclusion in the “You might also like” section of related business pages
• Removal of all ads from their business page
• Click, phone call, and e-mail lead tracking
• Exclusive e-mail leads
• Performance/ROI reporting

We packed a lot of value into Matchpoint Promote and made it really easy to opt-in to the product any time after you sign-up and setup your FREE business page. Setup literally takes a minute (30 seconds if you have your credit card out already!).

We hope you enjoy this latest release. Now go setup a FREE business page so you can start meeting new customers through Matchpoint.

We’re headed for PubCon and will be exhibiting at booth #53. PubCon is widely regarded as the most progressive and advanced SEO/SEM/Webmaster conference in business today.

I send one or two employees to every conference. I send my entire team to PubCon.” – Gillian Muessig, SEOMoz

Peter Adams (our President) will be speaking on the panel, “The Wonderful World of Widgets: How publishers can use widgets for fun and profit”, on 13 November at 2:50pm at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Here are some of the highlights you’ll learn from this session:

• Why a Publisher would want to widgetize their user experience
• Where different uses for widgets can increase revenues
• How to add variety and value to your websites

So come on out to PubCon Las Vegas, see our presentation and the rest of the informative sessions. To help you get there, here is a discount coupon code for 20% OFF the cost of PubCon registration.

Use this code: ad-83720 when you register at http://www.PubCon.com

Plus, we’ll walk you through a quick demo of the our advertiser and publisher products in booth #53 and you’ll get your own ppccpcclp hat.

See you in Vegas Baby!

I had the occasion to attend Online Market World because Matchpoint President Peter Adams was invited to speak on a panel entitled, “The Truth About Local Search”.

Online Market World may not be top-of-mind for most of the hard-core SEMers that I encounter day-to-day, but their Hwy 101 billboards at least attracted attention. For those that don’t travel along that corridor, the question espoused was “Need more traffic?” So, if I were a company that is looking to drive more online visitors (traffic) to my website, then I would be intrigued. Conference coordinators expected 2500 people at this conference on 1-3 October at Moscone West in San Francisco.

While I don’t need to review the whole conference here, I did want to talk about the Local Search panel I attended. The moderator, Christopher Scott, author and e-Commerce expert, was quite lively and the crowd wanted to know: How to reach the local consumer? Who are the providers of local search out there? How do you get around the directories? and How can I get away from having to use yellowpages.com ever again! These were the questions the audience brought up at the start of the session.

In addition to Matchpoint, the panel included Zvents’ VP Marketing Paul O’Brien. The representative from Local.com was unable to attend, so Christopher went over Local.com’s slides including the typical list of Don’ts and Do’s.

Peter started his presentation by addressing the audience question about who are the players in the local landscape. He divides them into three basic categories:

1. Search Engines—Google, Yahoo, MSN and a slew of vertical/alternative search engines;
2. Directories, such as Yellowpages, Superpages, citysearch, Yelp and Matchpoint; and
3. Content sites, such as WallStreetJournal.com, lasiksurgeon.com, petside.com, and washingtonpost.com.

Most studies will show that local intent coming out of each is fairly evenly divided: Search engines about 33%, Directories about 30%, Content has around 30%.

The biggest advantage of using Search Engines is that you have control of what you advertise; the “con” is that it’s hard to scale. SMBs and even large businesses would have difficulty managing millions of keywords over thousands of geographies. The biggest “pro” on Directories is the qualified audience. When someone is doing a search on a directory site, they are looking specifically for that service or product, which means there is commercial intent. The disadvantage is that your business will be listed with your competitors, but that is also true of search engines. With Content sites you have a massive audience, but they are hard to localize.

Then the question of qualification and relevancy was addressed. Stating the obvious, and sometimes frustrating point—people will click on anything. It’s hard for a business to create relevancy with 70 characters, so they get stuck with a lot of costly, irrelevant clicks. When looking for a service, it’s all about finding the right fit. Having extensively studied the click behavior of consumers, Peter reinforced the need to optimize.

The benefits of Directories for local search are many. Topping the list is that directory search forms qualify the commercial intent of users. This of course leads to higher conversion rates, bringing your prospect one step down the sales funnel. Most directories will qualify by category and geographic area. Matchpoint goes further to qualify with additional questions that are category specific—like a Yellow Pages 2.0 should be.

Peter’s conclusion: It is paramount for businesses to have multiple ways to connect – cater to consumer behavior. If you don’t have a website, you would miss those people that want to click for more information. There are people who want to call, and people who want to contact you by email. At Matchpoint, he sees an even split between the people that want to click, call or connect via mail. People want to contact you in the way they want to, so you need to be available in all three ways.

Zvents’ Paul O’Brien talked about how to optimize web pages—local SEO mirrors website SEO. To maximize how the search engines find and index your site, Paul advised the audience: don’t use java script, don’t use flash, don’t use PDFs, and don’t put important content information IN an image. Another secret tip is to handle the parameters at the end of your site so that they don’t show. Because the parameters dynamically generate web sites, Google automatically reads them and thinks it is not a permanent site.

Then the moderator opened the panel to questions from the audience. To state the obvious, local search is about being where people are looking for local but it’s been a tough nut to crack so far. You want to be there on a local level – go where all the eyeballs are. The audience received lots of helpful tips.

Peter addressed the question of local search on mobile phones. In the US, the number of people doing any kind of search from their phones is still very low. Other countries, such as Japan, it’s very high. But with web browser on smart phones, like the iPhone, you have access to local search even if you won’t have a special app.

Excellent reference sites on local search are Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk, and LocalOnliner from Peter Krasilovsky.

The audience must have enjoyed the conversations, as the scheduled 1.25 hour session extended into 2 hours. To summarize: Businesses need to be local, where the eyeballs are and available to connect with consumers in the way that is most convenient for them. To get the most from their online efforts, they need to maximize their relevancy and get qualification from searches. And businesses still need to blend their traditional marketing with online marketing. That’s the truth about local search.

While the saying goes, “it’s an honor just to be nominated”, I’ll tell you..it’s a THRILL to WIN!

Matchpoint was selected as the Search Engine Strategies Awards’ “Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine” at the SES SJ conference last week.

The ‘Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine’ is a highly competitive category,” said Kevin Ryan, vice president, global content director for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. “Once the finalists were determined by the SES and SEW editorial teams, our panel of industry peers evaluated the submissions and voted on the winners.  Congratulations to Matchpoint for its accomplishment.”

Advertisers can see why Matchpoint is so friendly and how we can help them generate highly qualified leads that work with the way their business works.

SES Awards press release

August 13, 2008

Matchpoint Evolves Ad Product, Integrates Widgets

The Kelsey Group’s Michael Boland recently wrote about Matchpoint’s additional new product offerings.

Matchpoint will soon be rolling out a new set of ad products to complement its flagship online lead-gen forms. On its own site, it will integrate more of an IYP setup with searchable business listings. With each search results page, a lead-gen form will be offered that is germane to the category searched.

This broadens the appeal of its destination local search site and gives users the option of calling a business or filling out a quick form that qualifies their needs and prompts a set of businesses to respond (user contact info kept confidential—more on its lead-gen product strategy here).”

It’s great to see that a prominent analyst like The Kelsey Group gets our product and distribution strategy.

Search Engine Strategies names Matchpoint as a finalist in the category for “Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine” at its SES Conference’s First Annual SES Awards.

Finalists in 15 different categories will be judged by a panel of industry experts and the SES Awards editorial staff, and the winners chosen based on innovation in methodology and execution, achieving success goals, excellence in tactical execution, and overall approach and category relevance. The winners will be announced throughout SES San Jose during its keynote panels, which are being held August 18-21 at the San Jose Convention Center.

It’s an honor to be a finalist but even sweeter to win. Businesses can see how Matchpoint is advertiser-friendly by visiting our AdCenter.

Parenting magazine, page 29 of the August 2008 issue states “A SITE WE LOVE” and clearly gives Matchpoint kudos for our service’s ease of use and privacy.

Since you clearly don’t have time to track down carpet cleaners for quotes, they can come to you via Matchpoint.com. Click on a type of service (and there are a lot!) and fill out a little form with what you need. Within a few minutes, you’ll have several quotes from local businesses, but they won’t have your personal info (the site’s the intermediary until you make a decision). Plus, it’s totally free.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Jump in the next time you need to find a service provider and try Matchpoint for yourself.

The Search Race for the Top 10 is sponsored by AltSearchEngines. And is now accepting votes or “picks” and Matchpoint would like your vote!

Here are the details on the voting process:

1. click on the box below or go to www.thesearchrace.com and register for an account.

2. you will get a email message to confirm–this is to ensure that each person can only vote once.

3. then find Matchpoint in the rankings under the Top 100 tab, we are #14 this morning.

4. next to the Matchpoint name, there are “Comments Pick Share” links. Click on “Pick” – that gives us your vote.

Thanks for your support.

Alternative Search Engines covers the cutting-edge of alternative and niche search engines, and is edited by Charles Knight, a respected industry analyst.

The Kelsey Group has it right. The Yellow Pages is all about leads. That’s why small businesses consider it such a dominant part of their local advertising.

The only problem is that Yellow Page dominance has not translated on-line so easily. This is causing Internet Yellow Page (IYP) players to face some tough issues as they try to compete with Google on-line.

One of these issues has to do with pricing models. The monthly or annual listing fee model that Yellow Page players employ offline, has limited scale in the world of online advertising (more on that later). This has led IYP players to add cost-per-click (CPC) pricing for online listings. The problem is that CPC pricing is not nearly as universally accepted among local businesses as it is for the on-line businesses that dominate the Google and Yahoo search marketplaces.

The allergic reaction that local businesses have towards CPC pricing stems from the fact that most local businesses are not on-line. What do you do with a click when you don’t have a web page/site to bring people to? Perhaps more problematic is the fact that the 40% of local businesses that do have a web page often lack the skills, time, or resources needed to effectively convert clicks into offline business. This makes advertising in CPC marketplaces costly and very risky for local businesses.

That leads directly to another big issue that IYP players face and that has to do with competing against Google for ad distribution on other web sites. This issue stems from the fact that Yellow Page companies have not yet been able to convert the majority of their advertisers to online performance based pricing due to the reasons previously mentioned.

These two issues create a very real catch-22 for the Yellow Page industry…

At Matchpoint we’re taking a different approach to helping local businesses acquire customers on-line. Staying true to the Kelsey Group meme, we’re all about leads.

Unlike listings that may or may not generate clicks, businesses purchase leads in the Matchpoint marketplace. Our leads give businesses access to qualified consumers that have confirmed interest in finding a specific category of service provider. Businesses can use the phone or e-mail to convert their Matchpoint leads into customers.

See what people are starting to talk about. Give Matchpoint a try.

If you’re a local business, sign-up and start generating leads for your business. Alternatively, if you are a local web site or publisher, you can add Matchpoint to your site and earn revenue from the leads you generate.

Today we announced the expansion of Matchpoint to local businesses across the United States. This is really exciting news for everyone that is frustrated with the amount of time and effort that it takes to find and connect with service providers.

Specifically, what this means for consumers is that you can now use Matchpoint to solicit competitive offers and proposals from over 10 million local businesses across the United States. Whether you are looking for a local gym/health club, landscaper, or a career counselor, there is now a quick new way to broadcast your needs to businesses in your area, evaluate their responses and determine which to choose to do business with.

Consumers remain competely anonymous to businesses throughout our entire process. We protect their privacy, by obscuring their personal contact information and relay the responses that they receive to them via e-mail. Our model ensures that consumers stay in control of who receives their personal information at all times. No more unwanted phone calls or e-mail.

This announcement is also very exciting for local businesses across the country. What it means for them is that there is finally a way to meet new customers on-line without having any online marketing expertise or even a web site.

What new fangled technology have we cooked up to make this a reality?

The answer is simple: the telephone.

The majority of local businesses do most of their business over the telephone and are not yet on-line. Knowing this, we wanted to meet local businesses where they were and not ask them to learn a whole new way of doing business. That means calling them.

When a business receives our phone call they are given a special telephone number that they can enter into Matchpoint.com to see the details of what the person is looking for. If they think the person matches the type of customer they want, they respond by calling the phone number and leaving a detailed voice mail message that is delivered to the user via e-mail.

So starting today, local businesses across the country are starting to receive phone calls from Matchpoint.com delivering them potential customers — for free!

That’s right, we are giving away a limited number of introductions to potential customers to every local business in the United States.

We are confident that once businesses experience the value Matchpoint delivers that they’ll want to sign up for an account and take advantage of the benefits that our paid program provides. This includes:

• Access to many many more leads.
• Targeting control – by category, geography
• Qualification questions – the ability to ask qualifying questions to the consumers on search forms
• Ability to respond to consumers via rich HTML e-mail

So if you are a local business that has been frustrated with other on-line marketing products that have you buying clicks or impressions, you are going to want to give Matchpoint a try.

Or at the very least, answer that phone call.