Looksmart

LookSmart Listings

[WebManager]

First of all I hope this is the correct forum:

"Is LookSmart a Directory or CPC? - discuss"

Anyway,

I sell blue widgets.

I recently changed my listing title from LookSmart's professionally written:

'mysite's name'

(which got one click per decade)

to:

'Blue Widgets - mysite's name'

(which seemed perfectly reasonable and cost $19)

But the editors have changed it to:

'My site's name - Widgets'

(so now I'll get 2 clicks per decade!)

Has anyone had any luck with challenging LookSmart's editorial tweakings (many of my competitors have their widgets first in the title!)

Regards

[static matic]

Hi Web Manager,

I had similar problems with Looksmart's editors 'editing'

They had changed the text so it could be construed as misleading in terms of the product/service I offerred.

I made the mistake of editing the text back myself, which they stung me $39 for.

I then sent them an email regarding both issues, and after a couple of attempts, they refunded the charge and changed the description.

It should be said that they did not change it to exactly what I wanted, but at least it was not inaccurate. As yours does not appear to be misleading, more cosmetic, you may need to be more persistent :D

However, once someone did reply to the initial mail, they saw the issue through to conclusion.

As your competitors have a similar listing to the one you want, it seems you can leverage that as a starting point..

hth,
Ian

[steveb]

They will make the title whatever is in the Title meta tag of your page.

[john vermont]

In a similar issue with LS, I was told they would only put my company name in the title. They did give me some flex in the description though and I get decent search results. It is now $19 to edit an existing listing I believe but still a gamble.

[worker]

I turned away from Looksmart when they made their changes a year or so ago, and I haven't looked at working with them since then.

Is there enough ROI to justify the relationship? Why would you work with a company like Looksmart?

[skibum]

IMO the key to having a chance at getting traffic from LookSmart is to not submit the homepage if there is only going to be one page of the site listed in LookSmart and the company name doesn't contain the keywords you want to target.

Pick the top product page which is most likely to be listed as:

Title: Product keywords - company x

Description: balah blah blah............

With massive bulk listings going in for some companies that pay more than .15/click that may get "optimized" by LS or some of their partners you really have to look for the opportunities that fall through the cracks.

[WebManager]

Thanks all for the advice.

steveb, my meta title is 'Blue Widgets - etc.'

[steveb]

I misspoke... they told me they list the actual title of the site. I would imagine 90% of the time it is very easy, and 10% they have to choose between meta titles, on page titles and how a site might refer to itself. I refered to my site as its url.com name on one page and they insisted on using that until I split up the words and deleted the .com part, at which time they listed my site how I wanted it to be listed.

[WebManager]

Well,

I've challenged LookSmart's editorial tweaking.

And to be fair, once their customer support gets back to you (takes a few days) they're pretty good.

Ultimately engines/directories are out to make money. In this case though I can't see how a low click thru can benefit them - unless others paying more do indeed have priority / better listings.

I'll get back with the response - if you're still there!

Thanks for your thoughts

[martyt]

They were fairly accommodating to me -- my original listing just included "site name" as the title. I wrote to them and requested "site name - <brand name> <product type>" and gave them the justification that my site specializes in selling <product type> made by <brand name> (both of which are *major* keywords for my site -- I also got them to update my description to include product type and brand name and several other important keywords. Took them a week or so, but the made the changes almost verbatim.

The majority of my PPC traffic comes from looksmart. It's got the best ROI of anything I'm using (adwords, overture and looksmart).

I did manage to get all this done in the first 30 days of my listing with them, so the changes were free.

Fortunately, I'm at the top of MSN results and several other results for the primary keyword, so I'm not going to touch anything, and will keep paying for Looksmart for quite a while...