Tag: SEO

Is Yellow Pages and Other Paper Directory Advertising Dead

Posted by admin – 10/03/2010

Yellow pages is synonymous with business advertising and has been for many years, but are its days numbered. Ten years ago you may have got some return fo

If you have ever advertised with Yellow pages, the process starts with a sales person coming to visit you to book your money making advert. For more and more of the advertisers the book is a money loosing proposition.

Normally the sales person tells you to expect lots of enquiries a week, that you will be rushed off your feet and the small monthly payments of 3 – 4 hundred pounds will be easy to meet as you will have so much business that this amount will be small change.

The reality is normally a lot different. I first advertised many years ago, fresh faced out of university after completing my degree in Media production, specialising in multimedia design.

I was eager to join the world of small business, selling my newly acquired skills to a hungry local business community. My advert in Yellow pages was going get me business the likes of I had never known. That year went slowly, I didn’t receive one call from that advert; not one single little enquiry.

I cant blame the directory completely, my advert was small but it was the only paid advert in the section. The web was all new and shiny,many businesses didn’t know about websites or thought them just a passing fad.

I even went and did it again a few years later and thought it was the size of my advert that was the problem the first time, so I splashed out on a full colour half page ad. I did get responses to that ad but twenty times less then the directory sales people were telling me the average response rate was for an advert of that size and in that section. I covered the cost of the advertising but not much else.

The thing was I didn’t know what I know now. Paper directory advertising is dieing, then it was just in decline now it’s on its way to the retirement home.

For some; paper directories like Yellow pages can be great but for these it’s normally out of hours services like emergency plumbers or services aimed at the older generation who don’t use a computer let alone the internet. For most

Advertising is changing for the first time online marketing spend is going to over take traditional paper advertising

If you want a business or service nine times out of ten the web is the place you look first not last. I, being a person who makes a living online one way or another do everything online from shopping to research to entertainment it’s all there. I suspect I may be a little extream because of my comfort level online but I don’t think average Joe is far behind me .

If you run any sort of business you need to be found online so you need to establish a web presence now if you haven’t already got one. If you main form of marketing is paper directory’s then you need to be moving at least some of your marketing spend to online marketing now , not tomorrow.

We can use Google trends to see how the interest in Yellow pages and Thomson Local had declined since 2004

Yellow Pages

Thomson Local

As we can see the Yellow pages interest has dropped dramatically over the last six years to approximately 25% of the 2004 search volume.

Where is the interest going

Online marketing is growing with the biggest gains in search volume being in SEM an acronym for Search engine marketing

SEO

SEM

PPC

online marketing trends

So as we can plainly see the interest in online marketing is growing.  I can see the growth slowing as we see with SEO (search engine optimisation) PPC (pay per click) is in a slight decline but I put that down to businesses trying to reduce costs.

Social Media vs Search Engine Marketing

Posted by admin – 05/03/2010

Social media iconsTo start with this post started off as a comment in response to MOGmartins post about Social Media, PR vs Traffic. Where the argument is,

whether social media sites, like facebook and twitter are of use to large corporations as traffic sources, or are they just vehicles for public relations and one to one, or one to many communications.

Now I both agree and disagree at the same time, let me explain. Social Media is about making connections with people which it does for individuals, but I don’t think it does for most businesses at this moment in time to make a marked increase in the profitability of a company.

Quality of Traffic

Social media like Facebook and Twitter do produce traffic. When someone clicks through what is the users intention. Is it to buy from or use the company’s services, for the most part , no. I myself see a link posted and click on it to be nosey.

With SEM or search engine marketing when a user clicks through from Google ,Yahoo or Bing you can be sure that they are actively looking for what you have to offer. The user has been qualified by the search engine. Of course some customers are more qualified then others but for the most part a user coming from a search engine will convert to a paying customer click for click a lot better then a user from Facebook or twitter.

The Flip Side

There is a flip side to this argument in that fan pages and twitter is like an segmented email list , it’s full of people who are interested in one way or another in what you have to offer. So per head, these interested people are going to convert quite well. when the right offer is presented.  These people are waiting to see the next big thing and simply have to be told about it . A well segmented email list can be a gold mine allowing you to sell to the same person over and over again. social media I see working in a similar way.

The Future

Nobody can be certain of what the future of social media and search marketing is going to be. My view is that we are going to see a total merging of the two, we see the beginning with Google and Bing showing tweets in search results. We will to have to wait and see.

Conclusion

Yes social media does have an ever increasing part to play in traffic generation for businesses we will just have to be creative in how we use these channels.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation Yorkshire Guide

Posted by admin – 01/10/2008

If you take a look at lot of web design companies, you will undoubtedly see a section saying SEO or Search engine optimisation it seems like this art has found its way into the main stream web design community. However, without a little knowledge, you could be throwing money away on an ineffective service, a lot of web design companies will tell you that they can optimise your site, but getting to the top of the search engines with the phrase that pays is not a five-minute job

SEO It is time consuming

A SEO campaign is time consuming and very intense, a fine balance of words and weights. With no closer way of turning the written language into pure math, but with the exception that part of the equation is hidden from you and changing on a regular basis. This is where true skill is demonstrated from the search engine optimiser to bring your site from zero to hero.

Control your SEO expectations

In my opinion, planning a successful website should begin as early as possible, months if not in some cases years ahead. A new site will find it very difficult to rank for competitive terms until, like a fine wine it has matured. In the early days of a website going live try to aim for search terms that, as I call it; are low hanging fruit. For example, the term “web design” is highly competitive and the chances of a young site ranking anywhere near the top 10 for this is quite small. However, if you add some level of localisation to the mix like “web design Yorkshire” this “keyword phrase” would be easier to rank in the top position but still quite a lot of competition from other web sites. We can take this even further by adding a less common qualifier, “Web design Doncaster” Doncaster is a smaller graphical area then Yorkshire so it should be less competitive for this term. You would need to, or get your search engine optimisation company to research this more in depth.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research is so important, as targeting the wrong words or phrases can mean a great expensive site getting next to no quality traffic from the web. Not all traffic is created equal. If you sell nothing but “green umbrellas”, but you are targeting the keyword umbrellas, sure, you may get a lot of traffic but most of it won’t convert to a sale because some want a white umbrella some want a yellow.

Calculating the Return on investment

The return on investment need’s to be considered before you undertake any sort of outsourced search engine optimisation. It is always a good idea to get your SEO company to perform a feasibility study before you undertake spending out on the full project. A search engine optimisation feasibility study involves finding out the amount of searches taking place per month for a selection of key words or phrases related to your product or service. Then you will need to discover how many sites are competing for the same terms. Factor in the amount of profit you would get from selling your product or service. There will be some form of estimation on the figures from this you will get a better idea of the amount of work needed to get to the top of the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and whether getting to the top ten will turn a profit or not. Its better to spend a little then to waste a lot

I hope this short guide has been helpful to preparing to take on a SEO company with some of the things you need to know as a client

Google Now Wants Dynamic URLs

Posted by admin – 28/09/2008

Google has just done a complete u-turn on dynamic URLs, in the past URLs had been rewritten so they were more “search engine friendly” now it seems that dynamic URLs are now back in favor.

Back in October 2006, the guys over at seoroundtable told us that , Dynamic URLs? Google Is Officially ‘OK’ With Them. But even then, Google still recommended, “rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions” as good practice.

John Mu Explains

One of the reasons for that is that we can use the information provided through the parameters to better understand what your site is doing with those parameters. For instance,the URL http://www.mysite.com/search.php?q=keyword can give us information about what is happening, it could even allow us to recognize that this is a search form and perhaps let us attempt other keywords that might lead us to content that we haven’t seen for your site. On the other hand, a URL like http://www.mysite.com/search/keyword does not give us any information at all about what the “file name” is used for.

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