Are newspaper publishers finally going to be able to monetize search engine traffic? Perfect Market, a company aimed at helping “publishers create additional value from their online content,” seems to think they can enable publishers do just that with its newly-released search marketing tool, The Vault.  

As anyone who has ever conducted an online search can infer, newspapers get lots of search engine traffic. What newspapers don’t get from all that search engine traffic is revenue. It’s a gap that can be attributed to the fact that visitors from search engines to a newspaper’s site use the site much differently than those who visit the site regularly – meaning the former will really only visit the site upon conducting a search.

The Vault serves to bridge this gap by working with newspapers to optimize their stories for search engines, so that visitors from search engines will see customized news pages. The pages themselves are essentially “bare bones” pages, consisting of just the stories and a few ads. It’s these ads, though, that allow for true monetization in that they are targeted to specific searches.

Perfect Market has already worked with such publications as The Los Angeles Times and SFGate and claims that some of its partners have seen increases in ad revenue by as much as “20X”. That’s not to say The Vault hasn’t been, and will surely continue to be, a work in progress. It’s already faced some issues, as Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land explains further.

But whether or not The Vault is the end-all-be-all solution for newspaper publishers isn’t really the point here. The point is that all marketers have been plagued with the issue of “how to monetize” at one time or another (hello, social media). Kudos to Perfect Market for creating a monetization model with The Vault, and, at the very least, providing us all with an example of how to leverage search engine traffic.