Get your business ranking on Google! Forget the yellow pages!
Are you spending more money on your Yellow Pages ads than Internet marketing? Why? Do more of your customers use the yellow pages than the Internet?
If you’re in any high-tech industry, this is old news to you. But, if you’re selling consumer products to a local market and still think that the two-color, half-page ad you are running in your local yellow pages directory is a justifiably better marketing spend than spending a little bit of money on your Internet presence, you may want to reconsider.
Pretend it’s 7:42 p.m. on a Friday and you’re at home and found that you don’t have anything to have for dinner (its cold today in Nairobi & it’s getting dark). You pull up Google to search for “Fast Food delivery near me”. Two seconds later, you get a list of restaurant names, addresses, phone numbers, maps, and website URLs. Just like that, you’ve instantly found what you wanted, without even thinking about where you keep the yellow pages.
Do you even have a yellow pages in your home or office?
Search Engine Statistics on User behavior
This is a common scenario used to establish how integral search engines has become in our daily lives. But what about the online versions of yellow pages? Here is some other evidence for you. In a September 2007 article written by Chris Smith for Search Engine Land, the trends he sites clearly show a decline in Internet Yellow Pages usage while search engine traffic continues to soar.
Chris writes, “It’s my opinion that Google’s (and other top search engine) innovations in local search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results pages (“SERPs”) is causing users’ behavior to change. Users are finding more and more the information they’re seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages.”
To many marketers serving a local-area target market, search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing can be scary, expensive territory. The great thing with all the different ways to get started in search engine marketing is that you can start simple and low cost and work your way up from there.
In this new world of marketing, outbound marketing strategies just don’t hold up when compared to inbound marketing practices – things like SEO(Search Engine Optimization), PPC(Pay Per Click) etc are becoming an active participant in the blogosphere and social media. The better you become at working all facets of inbound marketing, the more likely you are to show up on the first page of Google.
