Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Yellow Page Alternative - Get Cheaper Advertising

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.

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 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, such statistics prove irrelevant; however, the fact remains that nearly every hit arriving as one of 3.8 billion Online Yellow Pages views originated from a user first typing a search query into a major search engines. Local Yellow Pages have not fallen into irrelevancy because of the internet, but rather, because of the major search engines' easy approach and indexing of websites online, according to their relevancy to the given keywords.

For example, when entering in these search terms, the user will type something like "x in y" with "x" being a good, product, business, or service and "y" being a geographic location. The results from the search engines will then return in a lengthy list of applicable websites that display multitudes of information on businesses in the given location that are in the industry that the search engine user was hunting for.

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 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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