Sulekha.com Extends Local Search Services To 20 Tier II & III Cities – Revamps Site

Sulekha.com the yellow pages and classifieds portal (funded By NVP) which also boasts of a sizeable NRI community has announced its plans to roll out local search services to 20 Tier II & III cities. With this oll out Sulekha.com will establish its city-specific search services in 28 cities in India. The cities that Sulekha will cover with regards to classifieds and yellow pages are Agra, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Cochin, Coimbatore, Goa, Indore, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Nagpur, Surat, Trichy, Trivandrum, Vadodara, Vijayawada &Vizag. Sulekha also seems to have revamped its homepage and one has to slelect a city to browse the site further.

This puts sulekha in the local search space and in direct competition with the likes of justdial, asklaila and onyomo. Sulekha also plans to extend beyond the online medium and offer Mobile classifieds and yellow pages service to these 20 cities.

Inorder to monetize this local search service facility sulekha seems to be offering advertising solutions for the small businesses whereby they only pay per response. Sulekha aims to attract at least 50,000 advertisers to go live on the site by the year end.

Also Inorder to make sure that its new service is well publicised in Tier II & III cities sulekha is launching a new TVC in a week’s time, which has been done by their agency JWT.

Its nice to see Sulekha focussing on local commerce and getting its mojo right if I may say so. Though in the recent past sulekha has been described as Craiglist + Facebook I dont think I quite agree with it. I think sulekha is more classifieds than social networking and this move to go local will only be beneficial to them.