Monday, November 10, 2008

Yellow Page Alternative - Easier Ways to Advertise

By Greg Beaty

Conventionally, consumers seeking information about the location and contact information for local businesses turn to the local yellow pages. Though industry experts on the Yellow Pages directories across the United States note that traditional print Local Yellow Pages directories received 13.4 billion references in 2007, this number has been steadily declining since the middle of the 1990's. A number of factors have been attributed to this drop, including the proliferation of cellular phones, various directory offerings by cell phone companies, and the most noticeable factor, the advent of the today's internet.

To keep with the trends of consumer tastes, Local Yellow Pages companies have turned to the internet as an alternative method for their local business directory placement. These websites, which number in the thousands, can then offer a search box for users to find a local business in a given industry in a manner that is similar to the traditional print Local Yellow Pages. Online Yellow Pages, as a combined whole, received about 3.8 billion searches in 2007, which was almost a 13% increase from the previous year.

However, the nature of the internet presents several problems for companies wishing to successfully advertise in Online Yellow Pages. This issue occurs mainly because online references to the entire collection of Local Yellow Pages companies and their websites on the internet was around 3.8 billion, while the total number of searches in the top three major search engines tallied around 42 billion in 2007.

Alone, these statistics may prove irrelevant; however, the fact is that almost every hit recorded as one of the 3.8 billion Online Yellow Pages views first came from a user typing a search query into one of the large search engines. Local Yellow Pages have not given way to irrelevancy from the internet, but rather, from the major search engines' easy access and indexing of websites online, according to their relevance to specific keywords.

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 can appear with these search engine indexes results. Such Yellow Pages results are then an option, or link, that consumers can click to view more information on the Local Yellow Pages Online website.

At this juncture, knowledge on typical internet users and searchers behavior is necessary. First, studies, and probably personal experience, will note that results ranking higher in the search engines receive the most clicks. In fact, the figures bounce around at about 95 percent of all organic traffic is derived from the first three results of a given term. This strategy of wanting to rank highly in the search engines for a search term is just like wanting to be placed first in a Yellow Pages directory, but in essence, can be so much less expensive if done properly.

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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