Google Local Business Listings
If you're like most SMB's, you probably do a substantial amount of your business locally. Traditionally, people used local phone books or yellow pages to find services like yours. However, people are now turning to Google to find local service providers, and therefore you're at risk of losing to your competitors if your business is not listed in the Google Local Business Listings.
Google Local Business Listings typically show up when the user types a service oriented business followed by the city for their search. A Google Map appears alongside with up to ten URLs including phone numbers for each business. Google’s Local Business Listings are becoming even more important since they are being displayed more often in search before organic listings even start. As a result, they often get most of the clicks from users.
Google uses Yellow Pages and other business directory information from third party providers to generate the basic local search results. If your business is already in Yellow Pages, it'd likely be listed in Google local business listings. However, the information is often limited and usually does not take advantage of the new features that are available on Google.
Go to Google Local Business Center to create your free listing or claim ownership of an existing listing and update your business information. Remember to review your local listings from time to time. Google continues to add new features to the local listing, like the ability to integrate YouTube videos. Using Google Local Business Listings and its features will keep your listing exciting and attract more visitors to your website.
Labels: b2b search engine marketing, web marketing, yellow pages
Yellow Pages Advertising to Decline by 40%?
According to a new report from
Borrell Associates, printed classified ads will be virtually dead within the next 5 years. And in fact Yellow Pages advertising will begin turning to online versions at a rate of 38%. So although it will lose dramatically on the traditional end, Yellow Pages sales representatives will sell online ads at about the same rate to offset the revenue loss.
This apparently amounts to a loss of $5 billion over the next 5 years, and accounts for 39% of its annual revenue size.
The change is due the fact that online mediums are becoming the most popular with marketers and business owners. Online ads, video and paid search offer more bang for the buck, and allow changes even after the ad is bought. Add in campaign tracking and interactive capabilities, and you can see how online has a tremendous advantage.
Although traditional advertising is learning to switch to online, like the above example with the Yellow Pages, the question is: has the buyer? Yellow Pages online is not used nearly as extensively as Google or Yahoo, even with local search. Most people use online directories ONLY after not being able to find it using a major search engine. And with more and more advertisers understanding the value of being found in a search engine, they tend to ensure they are in Google so where does that leave the directories like Yellow Pages?
Get a download summary copy of 'Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages' by
clicking here. It's a massive change that marketers and business owners should stay on top of, to get the most out of their limited advertising budgets.
Keep all this in mind when your Yellow Pages rep calls you next time. The directory industry has over 34,000 local sales reps, so you can bet you will getting a call.
Labels: online advertising, online directories, yellow pages
