Sphinn - Looked in the Yellow Pages lately? Neither have your Customers!

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Looked in the Yellow Pages lately? Neither have your Customers!

Posted By: primal5 65 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.softlinesolutions.com)
Category: Online Marketing

For years, no decades the de facto advertising standard for small business was the Yellow Pages. If you werent listed then how would anyone find you? While the Yellow Pages still maintains a huge directory of listings you should ask yourself if anyone is really looking at it anymore.

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from ChrisLang 64 days ago #

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If you are looking for the Yellow Pages the best place to look is in the trash, that is where most go these days before they even are considered for entry via the front door.

We live in a rather average neighborhood in Mesa, Arizona. When the Yellow Pages get dropped off you can see my working class neighbors picking them up in their driveway and taking them directly to the trash can. We do the same.

from trainsem 62 days ago #

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It is easy to spot Americans because they write as though their "Yellow Pages" experience speaks for the rest of the world. The other assumption is that "Yellow Pages" only refers to the printed directories. I appreciate that you don't need up to four sets of the same data from four publishers and that one set would suffice.

When I worked for an SEO agency, we'd target print YP advertisers, so I understand the dynamic. Now I work for a YP company, so I make our online pages search-engine-friendly. I believe a lot of the IYPs do likewise to varying degrees of success.

Google "plumbers mesa az" and you'll find switchboard.com as the first organic result and superpages not far below. Even within the onebox results there is an entry from yp.com. Through syndication deals, some of the IYPs are appearing in Google Maps and other major search engines, as well as on mobile searches, 411 services, etc. The average SEO can't deliver all of that in a standard package.

In Australia, print directories are still a growth industry and mobile data plans are expensive, so not many people can be totally dependent on search engines.

from toml 62 days ago #

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trainsem,

Note that the person who wrote the original article is in the online marketing business, so the whole post is just a self-serving ad for himself with "facts" are cited but not sourced. As you say, yellow pages provides a nice list of businesses for him to target as his own prospects.

My own leads from the printed book in 2008 are actually tracking to be higher than they were in 2007. The number of leads from search engines are up too, but the volume is still only a fraction of what print brings me, and the cost-per-lead is about 50% higher.

Conclusions? 1) Online is growing but the book still works well too. 2) Most of the people I've seen that say that print is dead are in the business of selling ads online.

Insofar as only one book, yeah, but which one would it be? The phone company's book would seem to be the obvious choice but the Yellowbook brings more leads. (We're big on competition in the US).

And you're also right that yellowbook is the printed book, the online book and I get my search engine leads through them too.

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