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Posted By:
Khook20
322 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Local & Maps
A great article that looks at whether yellow pages online are still a relevant local marketing strategy.
5 Comments
Comments
With regard to referencing the probable dominant IYP within a region this is quite helpful.
As a business person I'd suggest extensive keyword research for one's business service/products within your logical region. Then I'd do a ton of extensive searches using expanded keyword research in a variety of engines. The expanded keyword research should have two aspects; your main and secondary keyword phrases that reflect the business and the major geographical terms that reflect your business. If any IYP shows high in serps for significant terms I'd consider advertising within those venues.
Dave
Great job by Chris Silver Smith on this post.
"Yellow pages sales reps who show up on your doorstep may blast you with tons of statistics on why you should buy their company's ads versus those of competitors or other media. The stats always sound good, but you've been in business long enough it's hard to trust anything coming out of a sales rep's lips. So, what do you do?"
To the question in the title I'd give a resounding NO. Reasons why... I'm in a major Metro (one of biggest) and ads per online book can run $350.00 per month. That's for a few lines of text with no ownership of content. $350 x 4 major books (online sites as well) in my metro = alot of cash that could be invested in SEO and other activities.
To see how effective the online YPs are I purchased the top ad on the largest site (monthly contract) and added a recorded call line (each call gets tracked) which has resulted in a whopping 2 phone calls in 6 months.
I also setup a $3.49 a month web 1.0 site that now ranks organically for terms (ranks above YP sites) and put a trackable number on the homepage to measure. Averages 30+ calls per month, many resulting in new business.
It's my opinion that small businesses are seriously missing out when going the YP cookie cutter route rather than hiring a professional (like someone on Sphinn).
*planetc1* - I'm surprised you didn't get more than 2 calls from telemarketers :) ...and I hope that wasn't an 800# you used for tracking.
I also think that there are options to make your advertising more cost effective on IYPs, like ppc and such.
One of my companies is a typical Yellow pages type of business, an answering service or call center. The Yellow page results ROI is disgusting even for this typical yellow page business. I do far better with search engines and text ads than I could ever do with the Yellow pages online.
Thanks for commenting on the article.
These are all very good points, too, and quite interesting! I naturally agree that if you're not getting your money's worth from the advertising, you should drop it, no matter what the medium.
I suspect that different types of businesses may perform better or worse in both print and online yellow pages. For instance, I think that travel-related businesses may likely do a lot better online.
Restaurants might do very well in both online and offline -- loads of people still look at print YP in their hotel rooms when travelling, so it's possible that flashy (expensive!) ads in print YP for restaurants might perform very well.
Also, for some types of business, low referral rates might still not be a bad proposition for ROI. An attorney might only get a few phone calls from an ad, but if just one results in a million dollar fee, the attorney might well consider the ad costs to be worthwhile.
As LocalHound suggested, PPC might be a very good option -- assuming that some percentage of click-throughs should convert to actual sales, using PPC ads might be a way of limiting one's risk and helping to insure you get ROI for the ad cost.