Twice in the past two weeks I’ve had conversations that went something like this:
Me: “Do you have a website?”
Mediator: “Nah, don’t really need one.”
Me: “What leads you to think that?”
Mediator: “I’m really just serving people in my geographic area. I don’t need to be found on the web.”
If you, too, have relied on the yellow pages and ads in your local paper as the anchors of your marketing and promotion, the time is approaching to reconsider your strategy. That’s because local search has moved from a search engineer’s dream to a sit-up-and-take-notice reality.
“Local search” refers to the use of a search engine to locate services and products local to the person searching. For instance, when we were looking for a green-oriented yard care service last fall, I didn’t look in my local yellow pages. I Googled “lawn care” and “Peterborough, NH” instead. It turns out I’m not alone.
Local search is getting tons of attention. One recent case in point is a study reported in SearchEngineWatch, which sought to determine whether and how U.S. consumers were using the Internet to find local service businesses. A whopping 70% of respondents had used the ‘net to find services in their back yards.
How sure are you that your market’s using the yellow pages and newspaper ads when they’re seeking dispute resolution assistance?
Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
But dodo’s didn’t have the benefit of US adults referenced them over 15 billion times like they did last year. And that’s just the print versions. 90% of all adults reference them at least once a year, 75% in a typical month, and 50+% on average month. How about on average 1.4X each week? And let’s remember that not everyone has Internet access to reference those websites you are talking about.
There is no other directional media that can provide buyers the information they need when they need it about local businesses than the print Yellow Pages. It is truly the original local search engine….
But if people insist, that same Yellow Pages sales rep also has a complete portfolio of local search and Internet based products that they can help you with.
Ken, in the interest of full disclosure, I assume you feel strongly about this because you work for YPTalk, which calls itself the “voice of the yellow pages industry.” So, I’m guessing it’s part of your job to challenge posts like mine and try to encourage people to not count out the yellow pages too soon? Fair enough, and I just want readers to understand your comments in that context.
I’m interested particularly in your comment about yellow pages reps offering internet-based products to help with local search. Every year for the past 4 years I’ve asked my yellow pages rep for data that demonstrates the Internet yellow pages ad they want me to buy will actually achieve the claims they’re making to me. I’ve yet to see any useful and trust-able data for mediation or conflict resolution-related listings. Do you have such data? It sure would be helpful to see!
Local search results on Google.ca are provided by yellowpages.ca
See for yourself. Go to google.ca and type in restaurants and the first thing that pops up under the sponsored links are the local listings next to the map.
Those TOP listings are provided by The Yellow Pages Group in Canada.
The yellow pages in Canada is what the future looks like. Print ads are digitized and are keyword searchable. Website are linked in and crawled.
Their new telephone yellow pages at http://www.helloyellow.ca/
The dodo is very much alive here in canada.
If any sales rep from any media shows up at an advertisers door and doesn’t have viable supporting data, by all means, they should quickly show them out.
YP publishers are just about universally offering local search on search engines and their own IYP products as part of an overall product portfolio. Many of those publishers can provide specific data based on call tracking results where the number or address in the online ad is specific to just that ad — another way they can show the ROI on these products.
BB, I’m not seeing similar results at all when I Google “mediator” or “mediation” and a geographic area here in the states. The top results I get just aren’t coming from Yellow Pages paid ads…those are nowhere in sight. Maybe it works for restaurants, but since this is a blog for ADR pros, that’s what matters to me.