Yellow Pages & Sensis Online - my take!

[Richard A]

Hi All,

Some of you may recall me wondering whether to try a hard copy YP ad last year?

Well, I ended up going with one regional YP ad (Gold Coast) and a Sensis Online ad. My reasoning is that my market (retirees) may still be using hard copy directories if they are not very internet savvy.

It was not cheap - there wasn't much change on $4,000 for them both.

So far, I have had just one call from the hard copy directory. For the online directory, well, it does send some traffic to my website, but certainly not to the extent that it would convince me to do it again. It is probably in the bottom ten referring sites.

I have had significantly better results from listing my business on free business listing sites - I think this is one of the best-kept secrets of SEO! If you Google something like "free business directory listing" and maybe include your location you will come up with pages of options. It takes around 5 mins to list, and I recommend that you have a target of doing 2 or 3 per day until you have exhausted the listings available. One free site (they actually refuse to take paid listings) consistently rates in my top three referring sites.

Way cheaper & more productive than YP or Sensis Online.

Seriously, if the YP don't work for my business which is aimed at people who are more likely to be using hard copy directories, then what hope do other businesses have?

Hope this helps!

Richard

[FS Concierge]

Hi Richard,

Nice to see you

Thanks for posting the results of your experiment for us - what a shame it was so expensive!

Hope all is going well and that you're having a fabulous weekend,
Jayne

[Richard A]

Hi Jayne,

Nice to hear from you! I hope you are online for pleasure (I have you pegged as a War Hammer fan!) and not working (like I am!).

Cheers! ;-)

Richard

[Emroy]

Hi Ricard,

Ironically, just below this post is a big ad for "Yellow Pages". Saying "What they can do for your business!". Funny.

I've heard mixed results, most swaying more to the negative side about Yellow Pages.

I had a look in the yellow pages for my industry, there was a huge amount of competition so thought it wasn't really worth it.

- Jake

[Richard A]

Yeah, hope we don't blow a lucrative advertising deal for FS!

Still, if YP want to stay relevant to the SME market they should listen to client concerns.

[FS Concierge]

Originally Posted by Richard A

Hi Jayne,

Nice to hear from you! I hope you are online for pleasure (I have you pegged as a War Hammer fan!) and not working (like I am!).

Cheers! ;-)

Richard

Hi Richard,
I must confess that I have no idea what War Hammer is...

But hanging out on the boards with you guys is always a pleasure to me, and never feels like work!

Best,
Jayne

[Tiggerito]

I acquired a client that was paying yellow pages about $6000/year and it resulted in only a visitor every few days. As I was a lot cheaper he decided to hire me!

He is currently getting about 2 visitors per day directly from the free directories I have submitted his website to, and that's only after only a few months work.

My article The Link Building Check List includes some of the best free Australian directories to get your business listed in.

All it costs is a little time to submit to these directories. After that you get your visitors for free!

[createdevelop]

We have stated to our clients before that;

SEO + PPC + Social Media + A website tweak gets you a FAR greater return than spending money on Yellow Pages.

In fact we have the case studies and the clients to prove this is the case.

To make matters worse, Sensis think they understand new media, and claim to do a good job, when the opposite is quite clearly true.

[Tim Davies]

Really interesting post, and results shared. We've been considering YP for some time however its really hard to get data out of them other than the normal 'we get X thousand keyword searches per month so on'. I think we'll agree with you for the time being and keep the battle up to SEO.

Thanks again for the follow up.

[mattybee]

Hi Richard,

Using directories are a great way to build citations on the web. The best way to get rankings in Australia is to get a google places listing. You can sign up free here. www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Set that up and submit it to google.

Once you have that signed up contact me and I will tweak it for you so you rank for many keywords in your niche (free of charge of coarse).

I am only new here and I would love to show people the power of using this system to get more market share.

To give you an idea of how powerfull it is, here is a link to my uncles BRAND NEW website that I optimised for him. Here is a pic: http://screencast.com/t/NjE5NzI4NWM

Pretty powerfull stuff, he is in the stone age with computers so I set him up a free site and did my thing and bang! He is ranking number one for some 20 keywords. Not bad for 45 minutes work. Powerfull stuff.