Marchex, an online marketing firm, announced Thursday that its search engine marketing subsidiary, TrafficLeader, will partner with Yellowpages.com LLC, a joint venture of SBC Communications and
BellSouth Corp., to sell local search advertising packages to small and medium businesses. The service aims to act as a search engine marketer to those merchants who don't have the time to learn the
ropes of search advertising in multiple different engines. The service also offers guaranteed clicks to advertisers for a flat fee, allowing small and medium business owners to not deal with the
bid-based system of most search engines to get the traffic they want to their Web site. A spokesman for Marchex said that the service hoped to gain traction with small-and-medium busineses by
employing the sales staffs of local phone companies.
--Shankar Gupta
