Yellow Page Alternative - Easier Ways to Advertise
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.
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.
The nature of the internet, however, presents some problems for companies wishing to advertise in Online Yellow Pages successfully, however. First, while online references to the entire collection of Local Yellow Pages companies and their websites on the internet was 3.8 billion, the total number of searches in the top three major search engine 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 a user types in these search terms, for example, he or she will type something similar to “x in y,” with “x” being a product, business or service and “y” being the geographic location. The results given by the search engines then return a long list of pertinent websites and listings, which display information on businesses in the given location, within the industry that the person was looking 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.
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