Yellow Pages®: doing the heavy lifting for small business
Stephen | 20 November 2009
Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.
It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.
Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.
Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.
These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).
Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.
Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.
In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.
In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.
And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.
People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.
The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.
