Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Day 1 of the Sidoti MicroCap Conference. I am Aashi Shah, an Analyst here at Sidoti. With me today, I have Locafy Ltd. It trades on NASDAQ under the ticker LCFY. I'm happy to welcome Gavin Burnett, CEO of the company. We have about 30 minutes today, including the Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. With that, Gavin, I'll let you take it. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and thank you all for taking the time to listen to our presentation. I'll do my best to keep that to around about 20 minutes or so, to allow enough time for any questions that you might have to be answered. So, being an Australian-based company, even though we're listed on NASDAQ, our financial year runs from July 1 through June 30. So, our end-of-year financials will be released around about the mid to end of March of this year. So, what I'm going to do today is to focus on the product releases that we have for 2025 and the overall direction that the company is going in with the products that we've built.
If you wanted to get an overview as to what Locafy is, we're a company that's built some pretty powerful publishing solutions that are powered by proprietary SEO technology that deliver online visibility faster and at a lower cost than traditional alternatives. What do we mean by that? Well, the reason that businesses engage with publishers or SEO companies is they're really trying to get found online by people searching for what they do. The majority of people will, when they're looking for a product or service, go online. They won't go to page two, they'll look on page one. So, it's very important to have a presence on page one for whatever it is you do in business. The problem is that historically, that's been very complex and time-consuming, often a very expensive exercise for many business owners, and often with limited results.
What we've done at Locafy is we've developed a suite of publishing solutions that are both fast-acting and also cost-effective. If you look at what our core product suite includes, we break that down into four main sections. One is business listing publishing and syndication, the two different things, and I'll get into detail about what they are a little later in the presentation. SEO rich landing page publishing, so we essentially can produce landing pages that target particular keywords and that will rank for what they're designed to rank for in key markets. Google Business Profile Boosting, and for those of you that are not fully familiar with what a Google Business Profile is, that's your main digital asset that Google is looking at. It's your online Google Business Profile, which will appear in local search maps should you be prominent enough there.
And a more recent addition to our suite is article creation and publishing. We do both now, and that is products that basically are designed to have an article on a particular topic rank prominently in either national or local search. This is the key problem that every business faces, is that they're typically located in one location, but their customers are all around them, and how do they make themselves stand out from the crowd in as wide an area as possible from where they're situated. Around half of all search is local, which obviously means that the other half is national. But for local searches, which we focus pretty heavily on, there are three things that Google is really looking for to enable your business to be more prominent in search results. One is relevancy.
Does your website or your Google Business Profile have relevance to the search query that is being input into the Google search engine? Distance, and this is also very important. How close is your business to the actual physical location of the person doing the search? And prominence, this is the other third part of the triangle. How well is your business known to Google? The more prominent your—the prominence of your site really comes down to traffic. Does your site get traffic? Does it have brand authority for the search terms that people are looking for? And is your overall online presence consistent? So, can Google trust it, basically? So, quite simple, there's really only three ways to be on page one. There's either paid ads or there's SEO, and that's it.
Number one, you can buy ads, and that's a very legitimate way to get to the top of search results. However, once you've actually consumed your advertising budget, you disappear off the search results. It's only as good as your budget. In terms of SEO or publishing, there are two spots that you can appear. In local search, and this is where people are looking for local products and services, Google will typically produce a map to assist people with searches to identify not only who the businesses are, but where they're located and are they close to you. So, it's very important to have a prominent position in that Local Pack. The second place is organic search results. So, these are the links you see either above or below the map that don't have that sponsored link on them.
They deliver a whopping 62% of all organic traffic to local websites. The top three search results within those 10 that are available on page one, they drive the vast majority of all the traffic. Consumers tend to trust those companies which appear organically in the top three more so than they do either ads or the lower-ranked links. The general publishing checklist that we have for success for our clients is fairly simple, following on from those key points there. One, it's super important to have an accurate business profile. By that, we mean making sure that your name, address, phone number is consistently published on many properties that the search engines trust.
These directories and search engines and maps and so forth, they're not going to deliver a lot of leads or inquiries, but they are going to give signals to the search engines that you're a business which can be trusted because your information is consistent. It's probably the easiest way to put that. The second thing we do is look at optimized landing pages for clients. So, the landing pages we deploy are quite distinct from the corporate website. While we can optimize websites, it's a much more scalable model for us to build standalone landing pages that resemble the client's corporate brand, which are designed to rank for very specific keywords in target locations, whether that's hyperlocal or on a national scale. We can do either. More so for local businesses, the third check is to make sure that your business profile is optimized.
This is a key reference point for Google to look at when it's determining where it's going to basically place your business in search results and a more recent addition to our arsenal is point four here, third-party validation or having articles published on digital assets that are more advertorial in nature, so just think of it like the old advertorials you might have seen in newspapers, writing an article about your company that promotes a particular aspect of what it is that you do and that enables companies to target some very specific aspects of what it is that they do, so let's have a look at our publishing products for 2025 and I'll go through this reasonably quickly. The presentation should be available to anyone who wants to go through in more detail, but this is a key point.
Every product that we produce starts with unique, authentic business content. When you think about it, how can a search engine differentiate between different businesses? Well, it's actually looking at some very specific content on your website and a lot less than what you might necessarily think. But there are a few key bits of content that are critical that are authentic and unique to you to help distinguish you from the algorithm when it passes through your website. So, the core product groups we have are listings, landing pages, Local Pack, and articles. On the listing side of things, we have two different offerings. One where we are publishing out to multiple third-party digital platforms such as directories, applications, maps, and so forth. And the second aspect of that is, given that we are a publisher ourselves, we own a number of online directories.
So, we get paid by citation management companies to publish millions of business profiles on properties that we own. So, that's the distinction there. That's a subscription model, as is pretty much everything that we do. Landing pages, we publish landing pages that target very specific keywords and locations and deploy those. And we typically find that we get results well within 90 days and often within 30 days, which is substantially faster than alternative methods of publishing or SEO. Local Pack and articles, I'll get into more detail as we go through here. So, business listing syndication, also known as citation management, is an area that we're getting much more deeply involved in. So, we have a product that can enable companies that want to publish their business listing information to well over 100 different endpoints in the U.S. and more than 50 in Australia.
Now, while this is more of a commodity solution, which you can find from lots of different companies, the biggest difference that we offer here is that same content we can repurpose and convert into products that we sell, such as landing pages and articles. So, by using our listing syndication tool, you actually are enabling the potential creation of additional value-added products utilizing the same content that you're using to publish your business listing. As I mentioned, there are two aspects of listing products that we have. One where companies pay us to publish onto many third-party digital platforms, and the second is where we get paid to publish business listings on behalf of companies such as the ones that I have up here in the presentation.
These are all existing partners of ours that pay a fee to have business listings for companies they manage published onto properties we own, such as Hotfrog and so forth. In total, we have around about 24 million business listings that our partners will publish onto our assets, which is a very sizable database of opportunity for us now that we have the capability to convert that listing data into product. Okay, landing pages. What are these landing pages? Well, these landing pages are essentially a website. The key difference is that they're highly optimized to appear in search ranking results for specific keywords in specific markets. We can tailor them for local search so that those pages will generally only appear in a specific physical location for keywords, or we can optimize them so that they will appear in national search.
Two quite distinct things, but we cover both angles. Who's the product really for? Any business that wants to appear in search for what it is that they do. Why should people use this? It's a far more cost-effective way to get a strong prominence in search other than trying to optimize your website. The challenges that customers face there is keeping up with the ever-changing algorithm updates, which is a very time-consuming, costly exercise and requires a lot of very specific expertise, which is not common out there. Local Pack visibility. This technology enables a business to not only appear in the Local Pack search results in the immediate location of where the business is physically based, but in a much wider radius than that.
So, typically, if you're a business and you're located in a particular location, if somebody was searching for what you do 5 mi or 10 mi or kilometers away, you probably wouldn't appear in Local Pack search results, even though somebody would be more than likely willing to drive to your business if they're only five miles away. So, what we're able to do is to increase the radius in which you will appear in that Local Pack and therefore increase the opportunity for your business to be found and generate additional revenue or sales for your business. Articles. We recently announced that we've entered into this market in quite a big way. So, we're essentially producing category-specific properties or digital properties that focus on particular business niches.
And we publish articles on behalf of our clients, which in the case that we announced is a large media company that's engaged us to create a range of niche content sites, which they will sell articles onto on behalf of their clients to achieve prominence in very difficult-to-rank markets. I won't get into the details of what those markets are, but we have published the first set of suite of articles for this client. And we're anticipating that by the end of the March quarter, those articles will have achieved the prominence that we're seeking, and we should start to see the revenue flowing in from that work that we've done. All of our products are connected to the source, and the source being Google Search Console or Google Analytics. And that means that the reporting that the client is getting is comprehensive.
But what we also do is we make it simple. So, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to be able to understand how your pages or your Local Pack or your articles are performing. We make sure that the dashboard is easy to understand, provides very clear analysis on how you might have gone for a particular reporting period, month on month or quarter on quarter, how you're actually improving. And we measure literally every interaction that is possible on those pages. So, product objectives, and I'm keeping a very close eye on the time to allow enough time for questions. So, each of the products that I've talked about there, we have tested. They're proven. They work.
The next step for us is to automate the production of these publishing products as much as possible to enable the scaling of this product in the key markets that we're operating in. The ways that we intend to do that is looking at our go-to-market. I touched on before citation management companies. The way that they're connected to us is through an API. They publish business listings on properties that we own, such as Hotfrog, and they're publishing very rich business data. The intention for us is to automate the production of landing pages. Taking that same dataset and producing landing pages that we can present to our partners that they can sell to their clients. That seems to make a lot of sense that we do that. It gives us scale.
And as I mentioned before, there's literally millions of business listings that we manage. So, we wouldn't need a high conversion rate to generate substantial revenues. The other target market for us is industry groups. So, the same principle as working with our existing API partners, looking at large industry groups or single focus. And I'll just use real estate as an example where, again, those companies would be able to connect to our publishing assets via an API and enable a scalable production of landing pages or articles or whatever it is that they want to deploy into the market for their members, whether they be real estate or home services, mortgage brokers. And I'm using those as examples. And the third group that we're focusing on is large marketing agencies. And what I mean by that are agencies that tend to deal with franchise groups.
Again, this gives us scale. And we know that we're able to produce these publishing products at scale at a much lower cost and deliver a much faster result than alternative solutions. So, in a very simple sort of flow diagram, the automation process we envisage looks something like this where a party comes to us, they create their business content, or they simply connect to us with their existing business content via API. We syndicate that content as step one so that it provides a very strong foundation for those businesses from a search engine trust perspective. We can repurpose that same content, push that into our various design templates to deploy landing pages, and then use that same content to boost their presence in the Local Pack. And the last step there is also to create articles.
So, we've created AI tools that will enable that same business listing content using prompts to be able to create an article, which we've already tested in market, and that article will rank for the target keywords that the customer is looking to achieve that ranking for. And in terms of the core product objectives for 2025, the objective is to build or buy more publishing assets and then utilize that publishing and SEO expertise to build, buy, and optimize niche content websites. So, who are our target customers there? Existing media clients. So, while we have existing media groups in Australia and the U.S., which we have announced to market, we would look to expand the number of niche properties that we're publishing for these clients to increase the revenue. Also, targeting new clients, so single-focus publishers or industry groups that are seeking prominence.
And acquisitions, we have again also recently announced that that is a key objective of our company for 2025 to add both technology and publishing assets to our business that we would intend to be both revenue and profit accretive. I think I've got there. There's eight minutes to spare for any questions, and I appreciate your time.
So much for the presentation, Gavin. I'd like to ask you a few questions. Can you tell us what you're doing in revenue and if you have any number that what the total revenue for 2024 was and what does the balance sheet look like?
Our next reporting comes out in March, so I can't talk to that as it's not public information as yet. Our 20-F was released at the end of October of 2023, which can be easily looked up through 6-K. Revenues were just over AUD 4 million for the financial year. As I mentioned, our financial year runs from July 1 through to June 30. Again, all of the balance sheet information will be readily available there. What I would say is that the company is in a healthy position without stating too much. As I say, we do have our sort of December reporting due out in the next six weeks or so, so I'm not able to talk to that.
Okay. No, that makes sense. Can you tell us what kind of revenue do you require to break even right now?
Again, I do need to be very careful around that. We have announced, as recently as December, we've streamlined the business. We've cut our costs dramatically as we've been automating the production of our products. We have announced to market that we are within touching distance of break even of profitability. I would anticipate that we would achieve that before the end of our financial year this year, based on the contracts that we've won, the deployments that we're currently undertaking, and the cost savings that we've made, which are now coming into full effect.
Do you have any requirements? Will you require to generate any new cash, like borrow cash, or in the next 12-24 months?
The intention of bringing more capital in would be to assist with any acquisitions. We're aiming to be cash flow positive in the very near future. Having said that, we do have an ATM facility in place, which still has some capacity in it. But our absolute focus is on driving revenue. We worked very hard to win a number of contracts last year. We spent the December quarter and early into this part of this year building out those solutions and deploying. And we're now aiming to see the results of those deployments through the collection of revenues, both later in this quarter and in the June quarter.
Are you considering any mergers or acquisitions or any spinoffs also for that kind of in this year, like calendar 2025?
Well, yeah, yes. As per the presentation, we are looking proactively at acquisitions. And specifically, we're looking at things like content-specific niche websites that might be struggling through recent SEO changes. And the owners or proprietors of those businesses have not been able to address the SEO changes, which we are confident that we can. We have the technology and the expertise to do that. And secondly, looking at acquisitions which complement the existing technology stack that we have that would bring both customers and potential distribution for our business. So, yes, we are actively looking at acquisitions that would be complementary and both revenue and profit accretive to the business. And that goes back to the previous question. Yes, we would need to bring on board cash in order to make those acquisitions.
Now, speaking a little bit about the competitive landscape, how do you differentiate yourself from the other companies providing similar services? Because it's such a competitive field. So, how do you compete with those?
Based on results, I mean, typically, we haven't come across any companies that do specifically what we do. While there's a lot of companies that do SEO, we're the only one that we've seen that offers a SaaS platform that delivers publishing products that are rich in SEO. Where we differentiate is that we typically can get results within a 30- to 90-day timeframe, which is substantially faster than traditional methods. Our model is subscription-based. And so, time and cost. Companies can often spend many thousands to tens of thousands of dollars over 6- 12 months to not get anywhere. Whereas with us, in a very short amount of time, you can see results for the investment that you've made. So, that's a key way that we differentiate ourselves is the speed to market to deploy the solutions, the speed to impact, and the cost-effectiveness of it.
Lastly, what I think is attractive to the larger industry groups that I just talked about is the scalability of the solution across various markets.
And can you give us an update on the progress with the large media publisher and how is the implementation of these articles going? And are you already generating revenues with them?
Yeah, yes. I did allude to that in the presentation earlier that we have published the first suite of articles, and I anticipate that we will see the results of that before the end of the March quarter, and I anticipate that we will start to see the first revenues from that hit our books.
One of the investors in the presentation is asking, for us who are new to the story, can you tell us how Locafy came into being and who is the management team?
Yeah, sure, well, I started the company in 2009, and I guess a bit like the Post-it note guy, he started out trying to invent the world's strongest glue but actually ended up with an incredibly useful product that people use every day. We didn't set out originally to be an SEO company. We just discovered that the landing pages that we built had a great deal of innate SEO benefits in them, and when we teamed up with Jimmy Kelley, when we acquired Jimmy Kelley Digital a few years ago, we embedded the techniques and technology from that company into the pages, which made them even more prominent. In terms of the management team, there's myself, CEO, Melvin Tan, the CFO. He's been with the company 12 years. My background, I built my first SaaS company in 1999.
It was sold to Thomson Reuters in about 2006, and that was an applicant tracking system. Melvin Tan, who is the CFO, he worked for a large global software company in a corporate finance role, and he was responsible for helping with the expansion of that business into multiple markets. Chairman is a fellow by the name of Collin Visaggio. He was the CFO of InterOil, which is a company that was previously listed on the New York Stock Exchange that sold to ExxonMobil for $2.7 billion. Our two other non-executive directors both have an accounting/audit background, Ranko Matic and John Chegwidden. That's the core team.
Thank you so much. And we're at the end of our time, but we really appreciate the presentation and thanks for spending the time with us. We hope to see you at our next conference as well. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and we appreciate the questions. Thank you.