Saturday, November 8, 2008

Yellow Page Alternative - Get Cheaper Advertising

By Greg Beaty

Traditionally, consumers seeking information on the location and contact information about local businesses would turn to the local yellow pages. Although industry experts on the Yellow Pages directories across the United States note traditional print Local Yellow Pages directories received 13.4 billion references in 2007, this number has been in steady decline since the middle of the 1990's. A number of factors have been attributed to this decline including the proliferation of cellular phones, various directory offerings by cellular phone companies, and the most noticeable factor, the advent of the modern 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, 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.

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.

Among these search engine index results, Local Yellow Pages websites may appear. These Yellow Pages results will then be an option, or link, that consumers may click through to see more information on the Local Yellow Pages Online website.

At this juncture, knowledge of typical internet user and searcher behavior is necessary. Studies and personal experience may help researchers note that the results, which rank higher in the search engines receive the most clicks. In fact, the figures prove that about 95 percent of all internet traffic is derived from the first three search results of a given term. This strategy of wishing to rank highly in the search engines for a specific search term is much like wanting to be placed first in a Yellow Pages directory, but can actually be 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. - 15359

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