Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Yellow Page Alternative - Easier Ways to Advertise

By Greg Beaty

Consumers looking for information on location and contact information about local businesses traditionally turn to local yellow pages. Although the Yellow Pages directories' industry experts across the United States say that traditional print Local Yellow Pages directories received 13.4 billion references in 2007, this figure has been in steady decline, starting in the middle of the 1990's. A variety of factors have been attributed to this decline, including the popularity of cellular phones, various directory offerings from cellular phone companies, and the most notable factor, the invention of the modern internet.

To keep up with the trends in consumer tastes, the Local Yellow Pages companies have turned to the internet as another method of providing their local business directories to the public. Thousands of these websites will then offer search boxes for users to track down a local business in a given industry in a method that is similar to that of traditional print Local Yellow Pages. Online Yellow Pages, as a collective whole, obtained about 3.8 billion searches in 2007, which was about a 13% rise from the previous year.

The nature of the internet, however, presents a multitude of problems for companies wishing to advertise in Online Yellow Pages profitably. This occurs largely because online references to the whole collection of Local Yellow Pages companies and their websites on the internet was just over 3.8 billion, whereas the total number of searches within the top three major search engine was around 42 billion in 2007.

Alone these statistics prove irrelevant; however, the fact of the matter is that almost every hit arriving as one of the 3.8 billion Online Yellow Pages views emanated from a user first typing a search query into one of the major search engines. Local Yellow Pages have not succumbed to irrelevancy from the internet, but rather, to the major search engine's easy access and indexing of websites online according to their relevancy to specific keywords typed into their search query box.

When typing in these search terms, for example, a user will type something similar to "x in y" with "x" being a good, product, business, or service and "y" being a geographic location. The results in the search engines will then return a long list of relevant websites and listings that display hosts of information on businesses in a given location that are in the industry that a person searches for in the search engine.

The Local Yellow Pages websites may appear among these search engine index results. The Yellow Pages results will then be an option, or link, which consumers may click on to see further information on the Local Yellow Pages Online website.

At this point, knowledge about the typical internet user and searcher's behavior is necessary. First, researchers perform studies and use personal experience to note that results ranking higher in the search engines get more clicks. In fact, the figures show that over 95 percent of all of the traffic on the internet is derived from the first three results of any searched term. The strategy of wanting to rank higher up in the search engines for a search term is just like asking to be placed first in a Yellow Pages directory, but, if done properly, can be much less expensive.

By constructing a website that is optimized to rank within the major search engines for the businesses local or regional keywords, companies can drive traffic and capitalize on their consumers' business with marketing on the internet. The usage of Local Yellow Pages, though effective prior to the invention of the internet and search engines, is no longer a necessary step to being number one in the go-to spot for consumer references, when it comes to finding goods, businesses, or services.

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