Saturday, November 8, 2008

Yellow Page Alternative - Save Your Business Money

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, 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 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.

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.

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