Alt Search Engines » Blog Archive » Driving Local Sales with Internet Yellow Pages

SES Chicago Day Two Local Search Session #3 of 4

Tobias Dengel: Website Pros

Every local merchant should have a website! But then what? Chances are that they don’t know hardly anything about SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This business bundles all of these services for one price for real life roofers and dentists, etc. This includes follow up analytics and lead generation, etc.

Bruce Crair: Local.com (that name sounds familiar!) Small business know that they need an Internet presence, but who has the time and skills for that?? Reminder: have a good, up-to-date website. Nothing fancy, but useful. Keep It Simple, Silly! Then submit your nice webpage to the search engines. (shows Local.com’s submission page). Be accurate, accurate, accurate!

Do organic (regular search results) and PPC (the paid ads on the right) ads both - not one or the other. Use your local address and phone number! Finally, track the results with an analytics program.

Justin Sanger: LocalLaunch

Was the old paper Yellow Pages phone book the first loca search engine? Web 0.0?

Local Search has so many players, so many products, so many weekly (or daily!) updates and innovations, it’s difficult for the pros to keep up! Who’s the winner in this space? Yep, the Yellow Pages. Ah, brand equity. His company “only” has 2,000 sales reps.

Everybody has to buy Google and Yahoo! ads, because that’s where the users are. But then that increases competition for keywords, and so prices rise. And when prices rise, Google and Yahoo! get more money. And when Google and Yahoo! get more money, uh, they keep it.

Scott Finholm: Marchex

1) Owns 200,000 domains, with over 1 Billion webpages of unique content. On the ‘net, it’s #1 email and #2 local search #3 IM. “You cannot automate creativity.” So they hire Philosophy and English majors - hallelujah!

Your website is the sales person on your staff that is often ignored. “There’s plenty of (SEM/SEO) business to go around.

Don’t worry, the printed Yellow Pages book is not going to disappear anytime soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.