Local search technology provider Local Matters has announced an upgrade to its flagship Destination Search product as well as its search marketing platform Traffic Director.

For those unfamiliar, Local Matters specializes in private-label local search products for online publishers and Yellow Pages companies. It powers the front end for 16 local search sites worldwide, according to Kris Skavish, VP of products and marketing. The majority of its partners are in Europe, including Pan-European Yellow Pages companies like European Directories (see past post) and Truvo.

According to an e-mail Local Matters sent today to publisher partners, features of the new Destination Search 4.0 will include:

— Easily distribute listings to third-party sites through search and map widgets, driving exposure and value to your advertisers.

— Make your own between-release site updates throughout the site to everything from SEO tags to CSS files. These new, extensible “hooks” into your Destination Search site allow you to make changes directly to your site on an as-needed basis to meet market demands. Our DS 4.0 technical guide provides an overview of all the customizations possible.

— Deploy A/B tests to evaluate the effectiveness of features, styles and pages and optimize your site.

— Craft “super category” browse pages that offer search engine optimized landing pages for verticals or themes like weddings or travel, increasing search traffic and new visits to your site.

The new Traffic Director 1.7 meanwhile lets publishers offer their advertisers pay-for-performance lead packages, including a back-end dashboard for campaign management. Other features, according to Local Matters, include:

— An easy-to-use self-service interface for advertisers to add rich content to promote their businesses.

— A lead management system that accounts for leads from your site along with natural search engine links, paid search engine traffic, and views from partner syndication.

— A rich, graphical reporting system so publishers can demonstrate clear ROI to advertisers.

According to Skavish, Destination Search 4.0 will also include a series of widgets that publishers can offer their advertisers. These will display the publisher’s branding and each has different functions that some advertisers might be interested in adding to their Web sites, such as mapping or customized searches.

“These will make it easy for anyone to go in and say ‘I want to add Yellow Pages search results on my own Web site,’ ” says Skavish. “They can configure a widget that has the ‘what’ and ‘where’ search terms they want to have results around, and then just stick that on their Web site.”

More examples of the new widgets can be found here.