THE CITYSEARCH TEAMUP: A SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING WIN FOR AOL
No man is an island in the world of search engine marketing, and if you cannot have the reach or the visibility that your online real estate properties need, then you have to seek help from friends. That is why the new partnership between Citysearch and American Online (AOL) created such a buzz last Valentine’s Day. This new marriage sounds like a love match and is certainly a good search engine marketing strategy.
How did the deal between Citysearch and AOL work out? The short of the story is that Citysearch and AOL will begin sharing content. They will also begin helping to lengthen each other’s reach across the Internet. The combined synergy of these two companies is a search engine marketing dream.
The arrangement simply is a win-win situation. On the one hand, we have AOL, an online business pioneer that is slowly going the way of the dinosaur, what with the supremacy of Google, MSN and Yahoo as well as the not-so-pleasant business practices it had engaged in during these last few years.
But for all those difficulties, AOL’s online properties such as CityGuide, Moviefone, Local Search and Mapquest still commanded some 106 million unique visitors in January of this year alone. AOL, though struggling against the well-entrenched Big Three, is still a force to reckon with. With good search engine marketing strategies, it can still hold its ground.
On the other hand, we have Citysearch. Another leader in local online directories, it has quite a lucrative portfolio in terms of local advertising listings – 18 million of them. Add to that are some 1.5 million user reviews on Citysearch’s website. What Citysearch does not have, however, is the reach.
So, AOL has the reach, and Citysearch has the local advertising. It sounds like a sweet search engine marketing deal, is it not? But of course it does. It is a real winner.
What shall happen next? Once the integration between AOL’s pages and Citysearch pages are completed, local editorial content and user reviews from Citysearch will be featured on AOL pages, not to mention merchant videos and photos. Because AOL has a wider reach and enjoys a traffic size that is still enviable in the search engine marketing way of thinking, the advertisers of Citysearch will be brought to the attention of more users online. On the other hand, AOL will get to have a bigger bite of the advertising revenue, not to mention a deeper, more localised reach, thanks to Citysearch. From the looks of it, it really is a nice search engine marketing coup.
But who is the real winner amongst the two, in terms of search engine marketing? Citysearch perhaps, because it managed to add a lot more length to its reach with the AOL partnership, a goal in search engine marketing? Or is it AOL because it managed to dig deeper, going on a local level with the help of Citysearch? Whoever scored more search engine marketing points is irrelevant, as long as both got the mileage they wanted.