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Why Yellow Pages Will Be Dead in Five Years

Let me start of by saying that I do have a Yellow Pages listing for my SEO company, Brick Marketing. It costs me about $50 a month for the profile on the Yellow Pages website. It’s a good way to help with my local link building, get a FEW additional local visitors and YP.com is a very trusted domain, so that helps uphold the value of my link portfolio. A few months ago, I got a phone call from a Yellow Pages representative asking me if I was interested in upgrading my account. Was I super interested? Not really, but I thought I should hear the representative out and see if I get could a few more links and visitors in more regions for a little extra money each month. The numbers I heard had me floored—and not in a good way.

In order to upgrade from just a city listing to a county listing, I would need to hand over $1,500 per county (Massachusetts has 14 counties) per month. That’s $21,000 a year just to have my business listed for all of Massachusetts. If I wanted to do a national campaign, I could snag the great discount price of $4,900 a month (which is $58,800 a year for those keeping track). Here’s the kicker—for my money my listing could see a staggering 60 searches a month. Not leads, not visitors, searches. That’s $25 per search! If I told a prospective SEO client that I was going to charge them $25 per search, they would hang up immediately and I would be out of business real quick. Think about it–even a local business like a restaurant is more likely to advertise on Yelp or the radio than spend that kind of money on a Yellow Pages placement.

I politely told the Yellow Pages representative I wasn’t interested in upgrading my account at this time.

So, what does my encounter with Yellow Pages have to do with SEO? First off, I truly believe that Yellow Pages are not long for this world. While the brand and consumer trust factor are still there, the company has failed to adapt to a changing marketplace. How people find, gather and sort information has radically evolved in the last few years and is constantly changing. Any business, not just Yellow Pages, that fails to recognize the online world is changing is going to get left behind. Steadfastly clinging to the way things used to be will not help your online business grow and be successful.

No matter if you are white hat, grey hat or black hat, part of being successful in SEO means learning to roll with the punches. Search engines are constantly rolling out updates to the ranking algorithms and various factors are being given more or less importance all the time. Social media has completely revamped the search atmosphere and mobile is poised to do the same in coming years. Google has 200 factors and some of them are out of our control, so we have to make the most of what we can for ourselves and our SEO clients to help them succeed. Sticking to an SEO model/process that is no longer effective isn’t helping anyone.

In the past 13 years (that I have worked in SEO and web marketing), I have not heard the online Yellow Page profiles or advertising actually generating any business for at least the past 6+ years. I would love to hear actual success stories from anyone that has gotten a lead (or even a client!) from their Yellow Pages listing in 2011. Was it a onetime fluke or can you really make a living with that listing? In my experience, it just isn’t worth the money but I would love to hear from anyone who could prove me wrong!

Category SEO
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Nick Stamoulis Brick Marketing

Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing, a full service Boston SEO firm. With nearly 13 years of experience ...

Why Yellow Pages Will Be Dead in Five Years

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