BT Formally Launches Small Business Search Marketing Product

Sep 4, 2007 at 8:38am ET by Greg Sterling

Like many other directory publishers and telecom companies before it, the former British Telecom (now just BT) has formally introduced a fixed-fee simplified search marketing offering for small businesses in the UK. Called BT Web Clicks, the offering has been around for many months but was just announced yesterday. Five pricing tiers are available, which imply more traffic at each level; however there are no apparent traffic guarantees. WebVisible is the vendor that manages distribution and fulfillment of the program behind the scenes.

BT is the former owner of Yell, the UK’s yellow pages publisher. While Yell has PPC marketing on its site it doesn’t offer a comparable search marketing program. Yell competitor Thomson Directories has offered a fully outsourced search marketing product for small businesses for four years in WebFinder.

All the major U.S. yellow pages publishers, several newspapers, certified marketing representatives, webhosts and many verticals use local search marketing agencies such as WebVisible, Marchex, LocalLaunch, Leads.com, ReachLocal and others to provide fully outsourced, simplified search marketing services to the small business marketplace.

The self-service model (as it becomes simpler) will work for perhaps 10 percent of the SMB market over time. The rest of SMBs will get into online and search marketing through traditional media channels (e.g., yellow pages) with whom they already have relationships. White label vendors such as those above make it possible for these traditional media channels to offer a simplified search marketing product (i.e., fixed-fee, guarantee clicks) to the local market and make that product easy to sell because it’s fully outsourced.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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