ReachLocal, the fast growing search and display sales channel for small businesses with operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, has filed with the SEC to raise $100 million in an IPO. The company recently reported that it has 500 + salespeople and 300 staffers.
Reach earned $146.7 million in revenues in 2008, up from …

On a recent visit to Stockholm, we sat down with Eniro President and CEO Jesper Karrbrink, who is managing Eniro through a strategic shift described in a presentation late last year as moving “from print dependence to online opportunity.” In a videotaped interview, Karrbrink insisted that Eniro’s product is its content. Print directories, the Internet, mobile phones and …

Closing remarks at the Warrillow Summit Toronto yesterday gave advertisers targeting the small and medium-sized business market some hope despite the alarming descent in optimism on the current Canadian economic situation.
A recurring theme over the past two days of the conference was the effectiveness of reaching small-business owners during times of major disruption. Two examples …

We’re just about ready to go with Interactive Local Media 2008, which is Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It should be a very important, game-defining event — and the first one for The Kelsey Group in the new BIA Advisory Services era (BIA Financial Network acquired Kelsey last week, adding …

To the ranks of Marchex Connect, WebVisible, ReachLocal, Yodle, Metrix4Media, Orange Soda and others add Clickable, a pay-per-click and search “dashboard” company that has attracted $23 million in venture funding from Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures and FirstMark Capital. The company’s vision is to focus on an Omniture-like dashboard for larger local businesses such as …

When Insider Pages was sold to IAC’s Citysearch, it seemed like it was probably a distress sale. Many of the Yellow Pages/ratings and review sites of 2004-2006 were falling apart at the same time. Since then, however, Insider Pages appears to have thrived.
“We are profitable and growing every month,” says General Manager Eric Peacock. “I …

Localeze biz dev head Gib Olander has a good piece in MediaPost in which he argues the need to refine local search marketing campaigns based on changing search behavior. In other words, the way people search and the terms they use need to be better recognized.
After providing some data that quantify the local search opportunity …

Over the past two months, we have been talking with sales reps in a variety of local media outlets who are selling search engine marketing. While we feel like some sales organizations are making headway in selling a significant volume of SEM products to their customers, we find that the technical aspects of SEM often …

I read with interest a recent blog post on the Utah Web Services site that really hit home with me on how SEM and SEO are being sold and how they should be sold. SEM and SEO are inherently technical products. The reality, as pointed out so clearly by a CEO (read decision maker and …

Elizabeth Gage of PCM International posted a well thought out blog on the challenges small and medium-sized businesses face when purchasing search engine marketing campaigns, either on their own or through Yellow Page publishers. After reading her thoughts on the subject, I couldn’t help but realize that the focus of current SEM efforts has been …