Yahoo Rolls Out Small Business Marketing Dashboard

Though Yahoo has handed over its search and PPC advertising business to Microsoft, the company still provides services to small businesses such as web hosting. ecommerce through Yahoo stores, and domain registration. As part of its suite of tools, the company today rolled out a small business marketing dashboard — meant as a one-stop shop where small businesses can monitor (and tweak) their online presence.

The offering has free components and opportunities to upgrade by paying for services. It includes Local Visibility — which looks at local listings sites like YP.com, Yelp, Google and Citysearch, to help business owners ensure their businesses are listed, and listed correctly. For a fee ($12.99/month with a three-month commitment), marketers can submit their business information to more than 100 directories.

Additionally, it offers Reputation Tracking tool, which gathers ratings, reviews and mentions from more than 8,000 sources and displays a breakdown of positive, negative, and neutral reviews so marketers can get a sense of what people are saying about them online. With an upgrade ($24.99/month with a three-month commitment), small business owners can gain access to all of these reviews, ratings and mentions, so they know where to focus their marketing attention.

The company has partnered with Constant Contact and Orange Soda to display data for email marketing campaigns and search engine marketing efforts, respectively, when the Dashboard users are customers of these providers. Both are companies focused on the small business market.

A web site analytics display — which uses data from Yahoo Web Hosting, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, or Google Analytics — is also part of the dashboard.

About The Author

Pamela Parker

Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media's Content Studio, where she produces MarTech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land and MarTech. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She's a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.