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)

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Those of you running paid search (or Pay Per Click) campaigns will have noticed a pleasant new feature in your Google Adwords account. Your keyword research tool now gives you numbers for Local search in addition to the standard Global metrics.

This should be really helpful for small businesses who regularly change or experiment with their ads. Quite often you’ll need to change them based on performance that doesn’t come anywhere close to what the keyword research would lead you to believe SHOULD be the better of the ads to run. The ability to see the which key phrases perfrom better locally should at least reduce the false starts.

Try it. I’ve run a few of my less popular phrases and have been surprised at the results, especially when you factor in spelling variations between US and Canadian English.

In case you missed the link to the keyword tool above, here it is again – Google Keyword tool.