Al Rotti is the first to admit he doesn’t know a lot about the Internet. But the owner of a Holden, Mass., power equipment supplier does know how people find his store online—and it’s not by Googling “Rotti’s Power and Service” and hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

After one of the tools he sells gets rated as a best buy, “people will go out and search for [that] product online,” says Rotti, whose company’s slogan is “Where Real Men Buy Their Toys.” When they do, his store pops up on search results across the Web, from Google and Yahoo! to WickedLocal Shopping (https://stores.wickedlocal.com), the retail search engine offered by GateHouse Media Inc. of Fairport, N.Y., in partnership with www.Yokel.com, a search engine for local shopping.

Meanwhile, Ottaway Newspapers Inc. in Campbell Hall, N.Y., is perfectly happy that most people are getting to the rich business listings it’s building on www.HudsonValley.com and six other regional sites through Google Maps. In fact, Ottaway entered a content-sharing partnership with Google Inc. (www.google.com), and is providing—for free—rich metadata offering specific information about more than 7,000 businesses in the markets Ottaway’s newspapers serve.

“The more data you have in your system, the higher your rank in [search results],” explains Kurt Lozier, Ottaway’s director of Internet product revenue. “The better results users get in Google, the better the likelihood people will click back and increase traffic on our sites.”

Welcome to the calculus driving the search industry, which in turn is largely driven by Google. By turning its eponymous search engine into the verb that describes how people use the Web, it’s changed the entire game for most content providers. Small wonder, then, that Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) tried to buy Google’s closest competitor, Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)—and was turned down for offering a measly $44.6 billion earlier this year.

In June, Yahoo! instead announced a deal allowing Google to place ads that appear alongside some of Yahoo!’s own search results. Although the arrangement does not require regulatory approval, the companies agreed to delay implementing it for up to three and half months while the Department of Justice reviews the agreement.

These high-stakes partnerships come before anyone has perfected mobile search, driven by location-aware handheld devices that can find the nearest gas station with the push of a button. “People’s muscle memory has them start with their favorite search engine,” Lozier says. “What’s important is providing them with information that helps them in the place they already are.”

Newspapers are finding wildly varied footholds in that space. Go to www.boston.com, and you’ll notice that the ubiquitous search box sitting atop the site defaults to a unified search of newspaper content, events, multimedia, area businesses and more than 2,000 local sites indexed, in part, by a team of editorial and Web staffers. “Human intervention is what we think is the secret sauce locally,” says Robert Kempf, vice president of product for www.boston.com. Gannett Co. in McLean, Va., may not be Microsoft, but it has acquired Planet Discover (www.planetdiscover.com), a developer of local search technologies Gannett is rolling out as part of its hyperlocal initiatives, while www.local.com partnered with MediaSpan (www.mediaspangroup.com) to bring its local business directories to more than 1,500 media sites, offering newspapers and their advertisers the opportunity to snare more traffic.

“Consumers are looking for local businesses online,” says Malcolm Lewis, vice president and general manager of Local.com’s private label search offerings. “Local advertisers want to be found on Google, Yahoo!, Local.com. Newspapers must address that need and accept they no longer control the majority of eyeballs and distribution.”

To that end, publishers are discovering potentially lucrative niches by helping their local advertisers play in both worlds—local search engines or directories of their own creation, as well as the infinite sandbox of the broader search universe, driving traffic and revenue alike.

“Many of the models I’ve seen equate to throwing darts at King Kong,” says Gordon Borrell, chief executive officer of Borrell Associates Inc. (www.borrellassociates.com). “But they’re a start.”

SEO a Go-Go
The first challenge for many content providers is just getting their sites noticed. That’s far less of an issue for The New York Times than it is for Al Rotti, but publishers still have to pay attention to how search engine “spiders,” automated programs that prowl the Internet, index and rank their content.

In a nutshell, if a site is linked to by a bunch of other sites that are, in turn, linked to by a bunch of other sites, chances are the original site will rise to the top of search results. Picture the “they told a friend, and those friends told two friends” shampoo commercials of the 1970s, and you’ve got a fairly good sense of the secret sauce behind search engine rankings.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, as shown by the burgeoning $2.7 billion search engine optimization (SEO) industry—and the fact that Google and other search engines keep tweaking their search algorithms to keep SEO specialists from gaming the system. Newspapers’ oft-linked content and sheer presence in their local markets are usually enough to pull their sites to the top of search results. When newspaper sites don’t top the results, relatively simple concepts can win the day.

“It’s not brain surgery,” says Mike Blinder, president of the Blinder Group (www.blindergroup.com), a multimedia sales consulting company. “All you have to do is some very simple things. If you can maximize with metatags, you can solidly win in the local space, and take that to your advertisers.” Those tags—invisible to Web users but all-important to search engine spiders—should include  keywords for the locations and topics of interest to readers.

“Think like users, not media people,” Blinder advises. “What do people want from you? Find those words, and use them.” For instance, The Houston Chronicle’s www.chron.com rose to near the top of all U.S. newspapers on Google News after staffers made sure all pages were tagged with the word “Houston,” as well as terms describing key news topics—Enron and Hurricane Rita, for example.

“Newspapers need to remember it is not just the headline that brings them up on a search page,” adds Peter Krasilovsky, program director at The Kelsey Group (www.kelseygroup.com), a research firm specializing in Yellow Pages, electronic directories and local search, and author of www.localonliner.com, a blog about local media. “It’s also the community content, such as maps, letters, ratings.”

Another growing practice is paying for search-engine eyeballs, a practice known more delicately as search engine marketing (SEM) or “paid search.” It’s a $5.6 billion market, and growing numbers of newspapers have become customers.

“There’s a big audience for people looking for news online, [but] a very targeted audience looking for [a specific] newspaper brand,” says Kate Stanford, Google’s head of industry marketing for classifieds and local sales divisio n. She should know—she previously worked at Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., and in her role at Google, Stanford sees users trying to find “newspaper-like content,” if not newspapers themselves.

Last November, The New York Times tied five of its key channels—movies, travel, business, opinion and technology—into a paid search and banner campaign across Google, boosting site traffic and the number of searches referring to the Times by name. This kind of promotion “is not just brand building,” Stanford says. “It’s really looking to showcase content offerings.”

Other newspapers buy keywords related to major stories, adding new terms frequently as news happens. “Not a lot of newspapers have the bandwidth to do that on an everyday basis, but as newspapers become more familiar with [search marketing], you’ll see more of that,” Stanford predicts.

Neither strategy is a novel one for newspapers, though the use of these tactics is growing rapidly. Less commonplace, however, is the notion that newspapers can tap the same approaches to help their advertisers. “The disservice we’ve done our advertisers is that we haven’t told them how to get found,” says Melinda Gipson, GateHouse’s former director of Internet business development.

Finding Advertisers
Creating local business directories has long served as low-margin, low-hanging fruit for newspaper sites. But something has changed, according to Blinder—namely, that the Yellow Page franchise is now vulnerable, leaving a much larger prize up for grabs.  “Seventy-five-year-old women are going to Google to find a plumber,” Blinder says. “It’s killing their market. If we do it right, we can win local search.”

But winning solutions are unlikely to stop at the Yellow Page-like directories long offered by both newspapers and their competitors (see story, above). In one way or another, newspapers’ approaches are likely to have connections to Yahoo! and Google, both of which have robust, if uneven, local search tools of their own.

Ottaway worked with Planet Discover to revamp its own business directories, designing an in-house metadata collection engine to feed information about local businesses—hours of operation, services and the like—directly to Google, a tactic long employed by national aggregators like www.restaurant.com. Rolled out in March, Ottaway is using telemarketing and breakfast seminars to encourage local businesses to enter their metadata for free and then selling premium listings and search positions on its own site. “Our goal is to have people understand that they may go to Google in the beginning, but they keep ending up with data and information from www.HudsonValley.com,” Lozier says. “Then it becomes a vertical search site.”

Specialized sites targeting familiar advertiser verticals are growing, says Planet Discover President David Lenzen. “We have deployed vertical search for home improvement, cosmetic surgery, gift guides and dining,” he says. “There will be more emphasis put on vertical or hyperlocal search functionality.” 

“Newspapers with local directories are finding ways to monetize that go beyond just site traffic,” agrees Beth Lawton, NAA manager of digital media. Still, publishers “tend to be far removed from the ‘local information hub’ concept that would allow them to compete head-on with the $17 billion directory business” —which has a whopping 5,500 categories, Krasilovsky cautions.

To capture those categories, other newspapers are shifting away from narrowly focused verticals. In Nashua, N.H., The Telegraph combined once-siloed listings of retailers, hotels and restaurants offered on its statewide www.NH.com portal into a single business directory powered by www.local.com to draw more traffic and improve search engine results, says Ernesto Burden, vice president of new media.

The Boston Globe’s Web site, www.boston.com, ceded the business portion of its new local search to Google, augmenting its data with specialized information, such as directions for Boston’s “T” mass transit system. While losing the ability to sell enhanced search listings, www.boston.com’s single-search approach places business listings front-and-center for relevant searches like “plumbers in Cambridge” and adds contextual display ads to Google’s listings—often from competing merchants. “We’re not monetizing the listings themselves but the advertising inventory around them,” Kempf says. “I learned this from the search engines.”

To be successful, newspapers will have to draw more traffic and rethink how they develop such applications, Krasilovsky argues. “What they need to do is really take a ‘sales first’ approach. When you are looking for a wedding gown, you don’t necessarily want to wade through 30 articles about the bliss of marriage.”

More emphasis also will be placed on helping customers find advertisers like Rotti, no matter where they happen to be looking. “We don’t think users come to the Internet to find stuff any one way. We want to be able to use search and product discovery to drive people into a store,” Gipson says. “Consumers don’t go to the Internet looking for stores. They go looking for stuff.”

GateHouse encourages local merchants to add inventory feeds or product listings to the WickedLocal Shopping site, so the products appear in local and national search results—as well as in print ads in GateHouse newspapers showcasing the most popular items offered for sale by a variety of merchants. And Zvents Inc. (www.Zvents.com), which provides local event listings to newspapers in The McClatchy Co. and The New York Times Regional Media Group, among others, has begun incorporating retailer events, such as plumbing workshops at a local Home Depot.

Other newspapers are experimenting with mixed models that blend business directories, banner advertising, premium search results and search optimization, all with the goal of driving more traffic to advertisers. The Savannah Morning News’ business directory on www.SavannahNow.com “works fine, [but] doesn’t get the local business in front of people using search engines,” says Online Sales Manager Dave Fogel. So last December, SavannahNow began selling packages, which include advertising inventory on Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com) as part of its participation in Yahoo!’s Newspaper Consortium, along with premium search results, advertising and a business listing on www.SavannahNow.com. That listing, in turn, links to the more detailed business profile in the business directory or the company’s own Web site, which helps boost the advertiser’s overall search rankings.

“Just mentioning to potential customers that we can offer them something to help get their rankings high has been a great way to get in the door and talk about other programs to bundle the SEO with,” Fogel says.

Growing numbers of newspapers also are working to help their advertisers benefit from paid search. “We need to be able to handle the placement of businesses’ digital dollars not only within our own media properties, but anywhere it makes sense for a local business,” says Lozier of Ottaway, which became a certified Google AdWords reseller in February. Ad reps can educate businesses on how SEM works, and even companies with past experience in the labor-intensive process of buying keyword campaigns appreciate having “a trusted partner in the area who can take over the work for them,” he says.

While high per-click costs can make it difficult for local advertisers to achieve a return on their investment, tying SEM to local search can bolster overall results.

“It’s a fairly low-margin business, and yet the conundrum for us is that it drives results, and it’s one of the things the merchant judges us on,” Gipson says.

Rotti is certainly quick to pass judgment. He says his store’s revenues rose 30 percent last year through the combination of local search and national reach. “They find the product and they find my store.”