Is Search Engine Optimisation Eclipsing Yellow Pages?

They say old habits die hard. To most companies, advertising in Yellow Pages is the unshakeable cornerstone of their annual marketing spend and they would no more think of canceling it than they would hire David Brent as office manager.

Surely Yellow Pages is established, recognised everywhere and enjoys strong distribution. For sure it’s expensive, but is there any alternative?

Expensive is perhaps an understatement. One Vertical Leap client with a chain of branches across three counties pays almost 15K a year to Yellow Pages. Even a small business with a moderately sized quarter of half page ad is looking at 3 -5K a year. A whole page? That can be anything from 5 to over 8K for the year There’s no negotiation; take it or leave it. Thank you very much. And that’s with the Regulators on their back capping and indeed cutting rates by 3.4%.

If Yellow Pages is reputed for generating direct sales enquiries, there are direct parallels with search engine marketing improving the performance of your website within the likes of Google, MSN and Yahoo. Consider the results being achieved by Vertical Leap clients right now. That retailer spending £15K a year in Yellow Pages is currently receiving 600 plus enquiries a month from their site – and that’s before the benefits of delivering product information to potential buyers on-line and overall brand awareness are measured.

So how surprising is it that more and more Vertical Leap clients are drastically cutting back expenditure on Yellow Pages? Or like a client based in Hampshire, is cutting it out of their planning altogether given the results of their search engine marketing campaigns?

Not surprising at all really. If you think about it, search is not new and it has played a major part in marketing activity for decades in the form of phone books and directories. Effective search engine marketing simply takes this a giant step further, unlocking as is does the incredible introductory potential the web medium provides between supplier and consumer to connect and do business.

This trend is reflected in Yellow Pages’ own market analysis, which shows a downward trend in client retention from 78% to 75% year on year. Interestingly, it is newer customers who are leaving.

With local search being one of the current battlefields the top search engines are slugging it out on, this surely compliments the potential worldwide coverage the Internet provides by its very nature. Strike one to the web and search engine marketing then.

Could it be that because the internet is a relatively new take on traditional search, and the idea of search engine marketing effectively campaigning a website to attract motivated buyers is newer still, that this whole marketing discipline is still craving acceptance from all but the more enlightened companies?

Search engine marketing has distinctive advantages over Yellow Pages. Let’s consider return on investment for starters. Rather than shelling out thousands of pounds for a quarter page only to find you’ve been trounced by a competitor buying a full page opposite your entry, search engine results are always evolving as new and existing websites vie for better positions.

A search engine marketing campaign from Vertical Leap concentrates on improving a client’s position within those ranking results across a portfolio of targeted keywords and phrases.

The cost of a search engine campaign is therefore not only considerably less than advertising in Yellow Pages at inception therefore, it gets better than that - the return on investment measured in new business requests and their conversion online frequently outperforms that of the flat performance of Yellow Pages as website rankings improve over time.

This is due in part to the flexibility search engine marketing offers over its printed counterpart. Obviously you have the option to refine and amend your website at any time. Vertical Leap will recommend an optimisation process, but more often than not clients find that referrals generated from their site will point the way to better capture and channel new sales enquiries.

With Yellow Pages the die is cast. Once your ad is placed it’s set in stone. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll hear from their team again – until it comes to renewal, that is!

So that’s the second biggest advantage search engine marketing offers – proactivity. With Vertical Leap you get what amounts to your own web team working on your site’s positioning in an accountable and ongoing campaign.

Search engine marketing exploits the superior search potential of the Internet to your advantage. If the core of effective search engine marketing is establishing which words and phrases are most used to find your site, it also presents a unique opportunity to claim those phrases – both generic and niche – for your own.

Try typing “managed search engine marketing” into Google and see for yourself which leading SEM company tops the first page! Tap in “brochure design” and you’ll see why CVA Media, a Vertical Leap client, is currently witnessing a surge of new enquiries for off-line work. Vertical Leap will aim to assign keywords and phrases as appropriate to a client’s website, as while “ownership” of such search phrases can never be guaranteed, their stewardship is your passport to those increased volumes of sales enquiries.

Search engine queries already have a monetary value that is measurable albeit for as long as it is paid for in pay per click (PPC) advertising. That’s why companies will pay thousands of pounds every month to maintain their placing in Google. In this instance, the parallel with Yellow Pages is startling – you can buy a whole page in one directory, but it’s yours for only as long as you foot the bill.

Search is by no means new and is second nature to potential customers looking for your goods and services. The Internet allows the whole concept of search to be taken to limits that were unthinkable only a few years ago, with search engine marketing being the facilitator that will be the deciding factor in deciding whether you or your competitor wins the business that is being actively sought, right now.

And finally, think on this. If ‘Let your fingers do the walking’ and ‘Good Old Yellow Pages’ are memorable advertising slogans that sum up Yellow Pages, look how fast on-line search is developing a new noun in its own right as people naturally reach for a keyboard to ‘google’ their needs and wants quickly.