The Yellowpages used to a be a great source to find reputable businesses. And if you are my age or older then you have heard the catchy slogan “let your fingers do the walking.” But in today’s age, the Yellowpages is only costing to a lot of money and factually driving business away from you. Here’s why:
- It can cost several hundreds a month to have an in-print ad.
- To have an ad that is seen you must alter your company name.
- Hardly anyone below the age of 60 uses the Yellowpages.
- The Yellowpages is way too expensive for the services it offers.
- More and more the Yellowpages is a dying service.
Search engines are the new “yellowpages” in today’s society. Except for people that 60 and over, few people will actually open up the Yellowpages, instead they are going to Google or Yahoo to find local businesses. I read that 98% of the 20 somethings automatically use search engines to find what they are looking for.
I speak from experience when I say that the Yellowpages are gouging you when you use their services. The Yellowpages cannot offer you anything that you can not do for free or very little cost.
When I first started my moving business, I was sold a website by a Yellowpages sales person. That 5 page website cost me $400 a month for as long as I had it. $400 times 12 months is $4800. That is a lot of money. And what did I get for it…A template website with little to no content that looked like 4 other websites in the same industry as I was — and in the same area that I was doing business in. For $4800 I could have had a website built with all the whizbang dodads and then some; and it would have been a one time fee…with the Yellowpages that $4800 was for every year that I had it. And finally, it was not even properly search engine optimized for my business, so it brought in no traffic to speak of.
The Yellowpages time as come and gone. Had it saw what was happening with the internet and acted quicker, it could have been the place to go in today’s society, but alas we now have Yahoo! and Google.
One plus point though with the Yellowpages, and that is they do have a free online business listing. As a small local business you should take full opportunity of this. Being in the Yellowpages, it gives you a powerful backlink to your website. And if you a familiar with SEO you know that backlink is very useful.
If you want to get seen by the most amount of eyes that you can, then you need to be dominating the the search engines in you location. Doing this properly is quite easy…but it is time consuming. If you have the time, then by all means then you should be all over this, but if you don’t have the time then you need to call in the specialist like me to get it done for you.
If you liked this article then mark sure you subscribe to my RSS feed and bookmark this website by clicking the buttons at the bottom of this article.
