SEO vs Yellow Pages-Are We Heading Towards Paperless Advertising?
Today, over 70% of businesses and private individuals log on to any search engine for research. In most instances, a majority of sites that come out in the search results are companies offering products and services related to the phrase that searchers typed into the search tab. Hence, the future of yellow pages and phone books are being much talked about especially after the projected 39% decline of these traditional advertising methods over the next five years. Businesses are now moving towards the utilization of search engine optimization companies to get their sites on the top results. With this migration, yellow pages and phone books are also going online but apparently, with poor results. Let’s take a look as to why their online versions are not getting enough traffic.
Cost of Search Engine Spending Is Significantly Lower
When it comes to the cost of advertising, companies spend less on search engines. This is because the cost of printing and lay-out is eliminated and fewer employees are needed to get things going. Also, materials for advertising are reduced to just the designing software, highly skilled designers and the monthly cost of maintaining a website.
At present, the cost of half a page advertising in yellow pages is about $17,100 and this is something that starting businesses would not want to shell out. On the other hand, getting you business advertised online would only cost a fraction of that amount.
SEO Breaks Physical Borders
Yellow Pages and phone books might still come in handy if you are looking for a business directly within your vicinity. This is because these paper listing narrow down your choices to what is immediately available around you. This is in direct opposition to what SEO can do. Depending on your search engine optimization ranking, you can potentially reach out to millions of consumers all over the world. This means two things for you: a.) you have to be prepared to accommodate orders from different countries provided that you offer products and not services and b.) if you are offering services that are specific to one state, you must be able to come up with a nice combination of geo-targeted keywords.
Local search engine optimization for businesses is an option that can be turned on and off from your search engine’s settings. Not all Internet users know this or would even take the time to change the settings so you must take it upon yourself to hire an SEO firm who can analyze raw data and provide you with the right set of keywords to attract local consumers.
Yellow Pages Provide Limited Information
This is perhaps the main reason of the projected decline in the use of yellow pages and phone books: information is limited to only a few characters. Each page in a phone book has a fixed dimension so ads are designed in a way that they would all fit together. This makes company and product or service information stripped down to only a few. Whereas if you advertise through SEO, you would have a page for yourself; not to mention the availability of search engines in case your clients need to read reviews.
Despite the advantages of search engine optimization ranking, yellow pages and phone books would still survive, although with fewer patrons. They are physical so quite difficult to misplace. They are also preferred by older individuals or those who are not technologically inclined. So even though the SEO industry will continue to flourish at about 20.3% over the next few years but will not kill the traditional paper advertising.
To help you migrate from yellow pages to online advertising with great foundation for a future increase in search engine optimization ranking, visit us at https://www.infintechdesigns.com/ or call Brian Hong @ 504-717-4837.
