Industry’s Web Sites Have Small Audiences, and Economic Downturn Has Eroded Ad Dollars; Hearst Unit Throws In With Google

It does raise a good question though – what industries most gain value from the Yellow pages? I can see that plumbers probably get good value from them but how about real estate agents or car service professionals?

I have a client who used to spend a small fortune on Yellow Pages advertising but now puts his advertising budget into Pay Per Click and is seeing a much better ROI. Targeted, local search terms are delivering motivated clients to his site for a cost of about 45 cents per visit. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that his cost per acquisition is going to be very low. It is also going to be very easy to measure, and that is the important thing. Checking his website stats on a Monday morning will tell him exactly how many clients visited his site and contacted him via his Search Engine Advertising campaign.

It’s a new advertising and marketing landscape out there and small businesses need to give some serious thought to where they will get the best ROI from their advertising dollar. Yellow pages is definitely not dead, and can without a doubt remain relevant for some time, but it isn’t for everyone any more.

If you’d like to know what we can do to optimise your website for the London Ontario market, give us a call (1.519.777.0257) or contact us at Ontario SEO (details below)

Ontario SEO

64 Paperbirch Cr London, ON N6G 1L7 Canada

1 519 777 0257

http://www.ontarioseo.ca

 

SEMPO have released their 2000 State of the Market report and there are some nuggets that should be of interest to small businesses in London, Ontario.

You can grab the summarized version of the report here and have a quick look. To me there were a few points that stood out:

• Almost a third of respondents has tried locally targeted search ads and thinks “it works great”
• More than three out of five marketers (62%) are willing to pay a premium of 1%-5% for local targeting, up from two in five advertisers last year.

None of this should come as a surprise but it does confirm the increasing focus on local Search Engine Marketing by non local companies. This really reinforces the need for local businesses to get a foothold in their local market. Even if its not as part of a larger marketing campaign, at least do it so that searchers are not finding your competition after 15 seconds of easy searching.

Also not surprising were the dominant players in the local SEO/SEM market:

• Google AdWords Local Targeting has solidified its lead as the most popular local search advertising program, used by 80% of advertiser respondents.
• Some 56% of advertisers reported using Yahoo! Search’s Local Match paid placement program.

With the way local search is trending it still surprises me that most of the small businesses I discuss local search marketing with are still spending their local advertising budget with the yellow pages or printed classified ads.

If you’re a small business owner in London or Southwestern Ontario, talk to us about internet marketing, website promotion and Search Engine Optimization. We can ensure that you will be found when local customers are searching the web for products or services that you can supply.