Looksmart Australia

[kaj]

Hi,

With the recent surge in discussion on the importance of a listing in Looksmart because of its prevalence in other SEs as well as its Google PR prod, I am wondering how much experience fellow Australian SEOs have had with Looksmart Australia.

A 2-day review costs AUD$299, which is half the cost of the US one. Looksmart Australia doesn't seem to provide its results to US SEs, however a bunch of Australian ones (and US SEs with an Australian division) do incorporate the listings.

I wonder whether the PR gained from Looksmart Australia would be close to the benefit US sites receive from Looksmart US.

Currently, clients in our area don't have the online budgets to fork out significant money for online advertising (we charge AUD$50/mo for full SEO!), so no paid Yahoo, Looksmart, PositionTech etc. listings. All manual SEO. However, we do have a handful of clients who may be convinced to spread their budget a little; and certainly for our company site and in-house projects we want to experiment more with paid inclusion.

Any thoughts?

Warmest regards,
Kaj

[Kal]

Hi kaj

In my experience, Looksmart U.S. is better value for money. I don't know if things have changed, but it used to be that you submit to Looksmart.com and your listing would end up in Looksmart.com.au anyway.

And as you pointed out, the amount of traffic from the U.S. version is huge compared to AU. But it really depends on your client's target market. Are they targeting Australian clients only or do they have overseas markets? If their web sites are targeting companies outside Australia, I would imagine the USD299 would be a good investment. If they only sell to Australia, then AUD299 would be ok!

It always encourage my clients to purchase Yahoo.com and Inktomi indexing no matter what and if they can afford it, Looksmart.com. Most of them make their money back in traffic within a few weeks!

[surfcat]

Hi kaj,

If any of your clients are non-profit (clubs, associations, etc.), governmental, or religious in nature you can submit them for free via Zeal Australia (http://www.zeal.com/category/manage.jhtml?cid=695660). Zeal members or LookSmart's Melbourne editors would then process those submissions, probably within a few days. Businesses would still need to go the paid route, though. Hope this helps...

:cheers:

[MsSearch]

Just as Kal said with Looksmart US submissions appearing in Looksmart AU..same goes for Yahoo...all my submissions to Yahoo US also show up in Yahoo CA, AU, Gb/Ireland,...

as surfcat mentioned, Zeal Australia is the way to go with non-profits...

[kaj]

Hi,

Thanks for those. It certainly sounds like Looksmart US is the way to go. Will likely try to build it into a package for larger clients; although I'm beginning to feel Inktomi is probably a 'must-do' for medium-sized clients -- the price drops for the 2nd URL onwards, so it could be worth it.

I gave Zeal editorship a whirl a while back but concluded it was probably too much effort for too little return as 95% of our clientele are commercial. That said, we do have one or two non-profit sites and you never know when it may come in handy; so my partner recently joined and took the quiz.. hopefully something will come of it.

I noticed Zeal doesn't seem to provide an actual direct link to each listed website. Would this make it useless for link pop, etc?

Warmest regards,
Kaj

[sanity]

Hi kaj :hi:

I posted a similar thread before reading this, silly me. I think Kal makes a lot of sense. From what I've seen of my own clients logfiles most of the sites LookSmart AU powers aren't that crash hot. Well apart from NineMSN and AOL.com.au but you can achieve good rankings from them with Inktomi which is far cheaper. Well that's my opinion anyway - YMMV :D


I'll be interested in hearing what you decide.

sanity