I was presenting on E-marketing and social media the other day and a business owner in the audience asked whether using the yellow pages – the online version – is worth the money they charge. I don’t really know what they are charging for what service these days, but I know when I had a business office in Calgary their rates were pretty high. I used their basic service (free listing) as well as added on a live link to my site. I did not get much results.
Back to the question at hand.
I explained that if he is not doing the basic SEO on his website that should be first. Well even before that he should have an objective for his website and design his E-marketing campaign around that objective. Then he should choose keywords and properly use on-page SEO to optimize for those keywords. At the same time he should actively promote his website offline.
(was just in a business the other day where I asked for the website and they had to ask three people to even know what the domain was – and one who did not know was the owner – and this business was targeted at young people!!)
Again back the the question – in my opinion is using the yellow pages online listing worthwhile. Well personally I do not know. Really the only way to truly know if any marketing strategy is worth the money is to test it. And the good thing about using online marketing for your business is that you can test and track everything.
“Half my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half.” – Old Advertising Proverb
There are many ways to track your marketing online, but one of the best tools is using Google Analytics. This is FREE – yes I did use the F word. Google was nice enough to offer this to anyone who wants to use it and I would suggest you sign up and set it up to track everything that is happening on your website.
