Miguel Helft’s Ping column in the Sunday New York Times highlights a new Google tool that enhances — at a price — the search engine’s free listing service for small businesses.
As the Times suggests with its headline, “These Battle Lines are Drawn in Yellow,” the new service underlines Google’s challenge to the traditional listing services provided by various players in a yellow pages business that is becoming increasingly digital.
The competition is focused on the mom-and-pop businesses that, as Helft points out, “make up a majority of the businesses in America but account for only a small fraction of online advertising dollars.” The growth of Yelp and other review and small business-related sites and services is beginning to move some of that money online, though, a development catching the attention of news organizations as well as the directory services.
Helft reports that Google has quietly introduced a service that enables merchants to enhance their listing in the search engine’s Local Business Center, which is free, with a yellow highlight, which costs $25 a month.
Unstated in the article is the similarity of the yellow stripe to the upcharges that newspapers have long offered to their classified advertising customers.
Just as interesting as Google’s enhanced listings is the Local Business Center itself, which I’d been unaware of before reading Helft’s piece. (Detailed instructions on using the Center are provided here.) I must have missed discussion of this service during last week’s conference on local online advertising.
Both the Business Center and the new enhanced listings raise a critical question that was very much in evidence at that conference: how can news organizations help small, local advertisers take advantage of such services from Google at the same time they develop their own revenue streams with those advertisers?
