Yellow Page Alternative – Easier Ways to Advertise
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.
In keeping with the trends of consumer tastes, Local Yellow Pages companies have turned to the internet as an alternative method to placing their local business directories. These websites, which number in the scores, will then offer a search box for users to locate a local business in a given industry in a manner similar to traditional print Local Yellow Pages. Online Yellow Pages, as a collective whole, received about 3.8 billion searches in 2007, which was about 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 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 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 building a website that is optimized to rank within the major search engines for your businesses local or regional keywords, companies can drive traffic and capitalize on consumer business through marketing on the internet. The use of Local Yellow Pages, although effective prior to the internet and search engines, is no longer a necessary step at being number one in the go to spot for consumer references in regards to finding goods, businesses, or services.
