Check out our latest SEL column on how to find the right market and vertical for launching new services for SMBs, featuring a chart that shows the penetration of SMB advertisers on leading IYP sites in 8 verticals, covering 8 major cities: http://searchengineland.com/where-is-the-opportunity-17232.

Our latest Search Engine Land column discusses how “SMBs Claim Their Online Business Profiles”. In this post we present a new target group of SMBs we call “Seekers”, SMBs who haven’t quite made the leap to online advertising, but are performing some kind of online activity.

Interested, informed, not quite sold but not adverse to buying, seekers are SMBs who may just prove to be great prospects for new online ad products. Armed with some knowledge of online advertising, they may just need a little help from the professionals to start engaging in more elaborate online marketing activities, and more importantly, to start spending money. Initial tests show they do indeed convert better than the average sales lead, and with up to 10% of SMBs falling in this category, there may be quite an opportunity here.

We’re very happy and honored to have been invited by Search Engine Land to take part and contribute to their weekly column on Small and Medium Businesses, Small Is Beautiful.

Our first column was published a couple of weeks ago, and we’ll have a new one coming out once a month. We hope you follow the column and let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see there. Our next post is scheduled to be published October 2nd.