Hi all, I am new to the forum and am starting a new business. I'm trying, as all of you are, to make the best of my advertising dollar. I just have a question for you more experienced business owners. What do you think is more effective, Google (both through SEO and pay per click) or the yellow pages? I know that demographics may play a role. Younger people are more likely to Google, and older people more likely to go get the yellow pages. I am running a computer repair and consulting business, so I have a mix of age groups. Thanks for taking the time to answer the poll question (sorry for the misspelling in the poll, should read "both" not box).
I find Yellow Pages to be too expensive for what they offer. However, you'll get good exposure (as a local business) by using a combination of both. Set up Google PPC Geo-Targeting and place a small ad in your local Yellowpages (print). I don't think it's worth paying extra to be featured on Yellowpages online. H-bomb
Yellow pages is as far as printed advertising goes very cheap indeed. remember you can go in more than one directory also. I think its effectiveness will depend on how many other advertisers are in your section, how close you can get to the first page of your chosen section and how well your ad sticks out compared to the others. I think pay per click is expensive and is difficult to know if its converting for many businesses, but if you use exact search terms and not broad it would probably be cost effective but I think you wont get much traffic for search terms like [computer repair wrexham] You would be surprised how many older people use the Internet today. I get many young and old customers from the Internet and because my site has good position in the engines It brings in more work than the yellow page. (although a lot of it is further away from were my business opperates) Seo'ing your website and promoting it to get good positioning in the search engines will bring in a lot of potential customers, but will be the most time consuming. I would get in the yellow pages as a quick solution. Perhaps have a very targeted adwords campaign. Then work on promoting your website for search engine traffic.
Well, I think you could be right. I set up an adwords account, and my most popular search term is [computer repair scottsdale] which is getting about 6 hits/day. Even including all my search terms, my Google advertisement is averaging less than 10 showings a day. At this rate I will be lucky to get a few leads per year from this. Obviously this will be a very small piece of the puzzle. I might have to expand the geographic area that the google ad is showing in, and get ready to travel further to my clients. Phoenix is incredibly sprawling with heavy traffic, so this is a somewhat unappealing option. I am prepared to spend the time and money it takes for SEO, but it will probably be an endless battle to get on the first page and stay on the first page of results. The way I see it, it's feast or famine. Those who do their homework and show up first in the list are going to get most of the leads. If my search terms are getting a hit 10 times a days, the first company in the google results is probably getting 5 or more calls a day from motivated potential clients. That's going to translate into a lot of business.