In the preceding post of this series on free SEO we looked at using local directories. Now let’s turn our attention to the internet yellow pages.
Your yellow pages listing will be found one of two ways:
(1) People search for your services on the actual yellow pages site
(2) People search for your services on a search engine, like Google, and the yellow pages listing is ranked high
There’s a chance that the yellow pages site is more attractive to the Google bots than your own website. Of course, this depends on how optimized your site is and what keywords the person entered.
Either way, you can see how a yellow pages listing is a nice, free way to create more “internet awareness” about your business and your website.
Well, maybe it’s not so free…
This leads to one of my issues with internet yellow pages. The basic listing is free, but you can pay for a more premium listing.
It’s just like the old fashioned yellow pages book. Remember how everyone got listed but some businesses paid for fancy advertising real estate? Same thing here, just the online version.
So when someone searches for your services using an internet yellow pages, they’re not getting a truly organic, alphabetic result. You can buy your way to the top!
Personally, I don’t think spending money on premier listings will have a good return on investment. Just get the free listing and go on with your day.
My listing on Superpages
Get ready for a knock at the door
Some online yellow pages sites will send a sales representative to your office as part of the registration process. This is a complete waste of time.
A human being does not need to show up, in the flesh, to activate your listing. It’s a gimmick so that they can try to sell you a premium listing or other services they may offer.
For example, when I signed my website up for one internet yellow pages company, the sales rep took fifteen minutes of my time telling me how much business I’d get if I paid for a premium listing. Then she proceeded to tell me that my office website was not impressive. She offered for her company to host my site and that the re-design would be free. At that moment I wanted to throw her out of my office.
I see no advantages to getting a premium site listing at this time. Maybe in the future our potential patients will flock to one of the internet yellow pages sites for the answers to all of their problems. When that day comes, I’ll consider paying a premium.
The big three
www.yellowpages.com (AT&T)
www.superpages.com (Verizon)
In the final post of this series, we’ll look at how Facebook can drive traffic to your website.
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