The JKB Marketing Blog

Yahoo's Overture has "local Match," a new service for businesses interested in reaching local searchers.

Instead of paying for a plethora of local search terms, businesses can target searches based on radius. The radius can be from 1/2 mile to 100 miles and can work off of different parameters like zip code, city, address and even ip address.

The service is pay-per-click and works as you would expect. There are no minimums or set-up fees. When searchers click on your listing, they are taken to a branded landing page that contains your address, hours, payment options, map and link to your site if you have one. There is no charge to create this page.

Local Match is worth trying if you can only sell to a restricted area, perhaps because you run a specialty shop or service business. Local Match is designed for small local businesses. There should be high-growth in this area in the future. If you have been thinking about beginning a paid search program, you might want to begin now while the costs are low. As you experiment and see what works best before it really catches on, you'll have a tremendous leg up on your late-arriving competitors.

Local Match follows on the heels of Google's AdWords which also lets you select by location, and the more traditional online Yellow pages.

Local Match is used by Yahoo, MSN, ESPN, MyCity, switchboard, infospace, dogpile, webcrawler, metacrawler and excite among others.