Online Yellow pages: How much will a listing help your business?
If you run a local business, or you are a professional such as a lawyer or therapist, you know you are being pitched to list your business on websites run by the Yellow pages companies.
The question is, should you list your business there?
And if you do, what else, if anything, should you do to put your local business or profession on the web and make sure that prospective customers and clients can find you?
What do the Yellow pages companies say about their websites? Don't ask.
Superpages.com is one of the most popular websites run by the Yellow pages companies. Superpages is run by Verizon Yellow Pages.
When you click on "About Us" on the Superpages.com site, you are taken to the Verizon Yellow pages "portal", where you learn that "56% of the US population turns to the Yellow Pages each week - an estimated 15 billion times a year. Your business has to be out there, especially as Yellow Pages users spend on average 24% more than other customers."
That might be true of the printed directory, but no claims are made for the website, Superpages.com.
And there is a reason that Verizon doesn't make claims about Superpages.com: advertisers often don't see any benefit from their listings there.
Why online Yellow page listings don't work very well
So why doesn't a listing on a Yellow pages site usually help your local business get more business?
The reason has to do with how customers find your business. They go on Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the Big 3 search engines, and they search there.
Customers normally don't hop to Superpages.com to do their searching.
Superpage's popularity pales in comparison to the Big Three search engines.
On Google itself, the website "Google" has 3.8 billion links back to their site. Yahoo has 1.15 billion. But Superpages.com has only 149,000! (Search done on 10-31-05). This means that Yahoo is one thousand times more popular than Superpages, in terms of backwards links, and Google is 3000 times more popular.
It's no wonder that businesses don't get much result from their listings on the online Yellow pages directories.
What should your business do to get more leads from the Internet?
The fact is that the public is using the web in droves, trying to find local businesses like roofers, people to fix their car, and even mental health therapists.
They're trying to find your business!
You can't afford to ignore the Internet. You need to make it easy for your prospective customers to find you, and you need to convert "clicks" into "customers."
What you can't do is sit back and say "we're on the Yellow pages websites, so we've done enough."
Without a good Internet marketing system, your competitors will grab your customers off of Google, Yahoo and MSN while you're sitting back waiting for the phone to ring.
Don't depend on the Yellow pages websites. Create an Internet marketing strategy or find a vendor who can provide you with one. Your customers are looking for you on the web. Are you making it easy for them to find you?
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Copyright(c) 2005 Sponsera, LLC. http://www.sponsera.com Sponsera provides
high quality Internet leads to local businesses. Our clients have included
DuPont, a unit of Xcel Energy, and the George Washington University.
See http://www.CapitalCounselors.com for an example of how we get leads
for therapists, and http://clients4therapists.com. For information please contact Richard Geller at rg@sponsera.com
or call 703.407.1089. This paper may be reprinted on a website provided you
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