YP Joins Google’s Premier SMB Partner Program

YP is the largest of the major U.S. yellow pages publishers (and local search providers), with roughly 4,000 sales and support reps and 575,000 (mostly small business) advertisers. The company has now joined the ranks of the Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner Program.

Also on the list are fellow publishers Dex Media, Hearst and hibu, as well as pure play digital agencies such as Yodle and ReachLocal. Google’s criteria for joining this program include the following:

• Large existing customer base of small/medium sized businesses
• Tele field sales force with the ability to sell Google’s advertising products
• Commitment to provide phone and/or email customer support to their advertiser base
• Existing operational infrastructure (billing, reporting, etc.) to service thousands of customers

There are currently 19 companies that have qualified under these criteria:

Though Google just introduced the streamlined Google My Business program for self-service it relies heavily on third parties with large salesforces and support organizations to bring SMBs into AdWords. It’s not entirely clear how many advertisers this list above represents but it’s probably at least two or maybe three million.

While YP has partnered with Google to deliver value to its small business advertisers it seeks to directly compete with the company among consumers and local search users.