Search Engine Optimization SEO Service

SEO vs Yellow Pages

If you have ever talked with a salesperson from your local Yellow Pages company, you can feel how desperate the industry is. In the old days when every business had to have a presence in the Yellow Pages and companies compete with each other for attention by printing larger ads, Yellow Pages in some locations charge $5,000/month for a half-page ad. That is $60,000 a year! A full-page ad can cost a business over $100,000 a year!

Well, as search engines become the place for people to search for products, services and information, smart businesses are putting their money into search engine optimization to make their websites more findable by searchers. When it comes to cost, SEO costs only a fraction of the Yellow Pages ad's. Unlike Yellow Pages charges a fixed price over 12 months, regardless of the results, SEO can be very scalable. The SEO cost can be varied based on the business' needs. Even spending $5,000 on SEO can produce great, long-lasting results.

Many business owners are still skeptical about the effectiveness of SEO. Well, if SEO doesn't work, why do you think your competitors are all doing it? Based on the experience of our clients, those who advertised on Yellow Pages have all stopped after they started with our SEO service. In term of the return on investment, SEO outperforms Yellow Pages by 5-10 times.

Yellow Pages companies are pulling some "magic" internet tricks, which amount to some worthless advertising. They build a generic website from their standard template so your web site looks identical to your competitors' sites or even sites from another industry. They then use the pay-per-click advertising to get some traffic. Only 20-30% of web users use pay-per-click. The Yellow Pages strategy leaves out the majority of the web audience. No wonder it didn't work, isn't working and will not work.

If you are still debating whether to renew your Yellow Pages ads, here is an objective look at this dying industry by The Wall Street Journal:

The yellow-pages industry is running out of lifelines.

In recent years, as its customers migrated to the Web -- flocking to sites like Google -- the telephone-directory business followed, hoping the Internet
would be its salvation.

But that strategy hasn't panned out. Now, the economic downturn is sending the already ailing business into a tailspin.

The audience for online yellow pages remains relatively small, and traffic growth is slowing. So many directory services are vying for the ad dollars of local businesses that no single site has an authoritative roster.

Meanwhile, ad dollars are drying up as small businesses -- the industry's bread and butter -- find it harder to pay bills or have cut their spending sharply.

... ,.. Quoted from Extinction Threatens Yellow-Pages Publishers, by
EMILY STEEL, The Wall Street Journal, Nov 17, 2008

posted by Terry at Permanent Link