Are business owners listing themselves in the yellow pages?
I work for a company called AiYellow. It is a great platform for business owners to advertise their products or services at an inexpensive cost. With certain keywords clients can find your business on any search engine, even if they don't know your business name.
I want to know if business owners know about AiYellow. If not, are they listing their businesses in other yellow pages or similar platforms to get exposure?
Pay to list international directories (whether on-line or their hard copy predecessors), are and always have been impossible to justify. I have advised my clients to leave well alone for at least the last 30 years, there are thousands of far better alternatives for your marketing spend.
If I were you Fanie, I would seek out a more rewarding environment for your efforts.
As someone who has been an advertising professional and ad agency owner for over 48 years, I have watched the Yellow Pages brand take a nose-dive (and belly-flop) for decades now—primarily because the brand became greedy and self-serving. Instead of rewarding faithful customers, an advertiser had to buy larger and more expensive ads each year in order to keep a prime spot.
Eventually, the majority of Yellow Pages listings became bloated with full page and double-truck attorney ads, ad infinitum, ad nauseaum. My advice, Fanie, is to put aside selling bacon-flavored lipstick and seek a position in major media sales.
Thank to everybody who responded to my question about advertising on AiYellow, the new yellow pages on the internet. Herewith more information.
AIYellow is one of the leading companies in marketing online advertising directories in the world.
# AIYellow is the fastest growing online advertising portal.
# Rated among the top 5000 websites in the world.
# We operate in over 180 countries worldwide and already have over 2 million businesses registered in our online directory.
# We have the most complete and affordable business-online advertising profiles in the market.
# We are becoming the new worlds digital-marketplace.
95% of customers are already familiar with the Yellow Pages concept.
# We make sure your clients reach you by providing the most appropriate marketing strategies for your business.
# Our ads are optimized to be indexed by the biggest search engines.
# We enable your business to be found by those who are searching and willing to buy your products and services, whenever and wherever they are searching.
Simple setup. Simple use. Effective marketing.
For only $30 per year for the standard add, can your business afford not to be on AiYellow?
Yes business owners are still optimally listing and directly advertising in the established directories.
The only way they will get to know about AiYellow is if you folks develop an advertising pitch that is better than the others, and will allow the company advertising with you to stand out in a crowded market place...
From an #SEO stand point it make sense. Whereever you can get your business listed is a + any day of the week whether you get 5 , 20, 200 visitors then it's doing its job. The only thing to consider from a business stand point is how much are businesses spending to be listed.
In my own personal business, I get to be listed in the top 150 search engine, apps, and company listings. I can update all my listings all at once from one platform.Very convienent for those people that like to DIY.
The main benefit of a small business having a listing is for establishing credit for financing certain aspects of the business if need in the future. Another reason would be to gain visibility. Most business will subscribe or submit their business to more than one online yellow page source to gain visibility in the search engines. To be effective with it, the business will find high ranking pages based on online comparisons.
Great question Fanie.
Hi Fanie,
I'm a SEO and help a lot of clients sign up for online directory sites like Yellow Pages. I have never heard of AiYellow. Yellow Pages, and a lot of these other directory-type business listing sites, will get their information from a aggregation machine, often a much larger company. In the case of aggregators, there are like four big players. If your business is listed in any number of their affiliate sites, a business will usually be featured in a multitude of other directory sites.
This is why many times a business owner will see their business listed on a site -- often incorrectly -- even though they never placed a listing there. Many of these directories are free although some are paid online which it sounds like AiYellow is.
Online local directory listings are good for local search engine optimization (SEO) and I recommend to my clients who are trying to rank in the search engines that they embark on a local citation building (directory listing) campaign with sites like Google Places for Business, Yelp, Bing Local and Yahoo Local. Maybe AiYellow should consider teaming with SEOs like myself to get the word out about their service if it is in fact online.
I presumed all new business accounts were given an introductory simple website. A basic website without photos, meta-tags, or any details describing the business services offered to which target market. Google has random photos placed on the complimentary websites for new business owners to make the content somewhat relative. The best strategy would be a cost effective and efficient application that is user friendly to enhance your flexibility to accomplish a task. The platform where the business content is placed must have integrity in regards to being accessible for quality control questions. Finally, the terms and conditions or status or jurisdiction of content placed must be in good faith and intentions.
Look for Nefer Kwi resources to offer another alternative to accomplish your task...
I have not heard of AiYellow. What is their angle?
I have taken over several accounts where the client was buying Yellow Pages online ads as well as SEO services. We pull the plug every time. The budget gets redirected to GoogleAds for the majority, but it depends on what they are selling. For the most part GoogleAds hasn't out-performed YellowPages by a small margin - it completely blows them away. The bang for the buck isn't even comparable.
Fanie, sorry to say, I don't think I would advise any of my clients to put any money into PAID directory advertising today. There are a jillion online directories today, but you can list in the vast majority of them for free . I DO think it is worth the effort to make sure you are listed (for free) and with up to date information on as many of them as you can. But you can do the listing yourself. Many of the "listing management services" -- especially Yext -- are in my opinion a huge rip-off and charge an ongoing fortune for doing very little. The only one I might consider would be Moz.com. At $84/year they are the only reasonably priced service I've come across.
Al Shultz alshultz.com/
It has an Alexa rating of 34,475, so it's getting traffic, but I would put my money for other online media.
List your offerings wherever people are searching for what you sell. Who uses the Yellow Pages these days? And for what kind of products and services? I don't know, but there must be research on this. Personally, I can't recall the last time I cracked the Yellow Pages.
I am not sure I totally agree with John. However I have no idea about AiYellow since it is something I have never heard of.
I will agree that people these days are more likely to look up Joe's roofing on the internet than to look in the yellow pages. If however someone is searching for Roofing contractors in Metropolis the yellow page listings come out pretty high and that may have some value.
Again, I have never heard of AiYellow which I think is not the same as the usual yellow pages and am doubtful as to the value.
Hey Ray - I do agree with John. I think most people who do a search on Google or Yahoo recognize that the YellowPage listing, regardless of its rank, is just another list - not the answer. And it's not likely as good quality as the list they have in front of them. They want their next click to be their last and for that reason will click on all the potential result links before trying another directory. I would go to page three of Google before trying a YellowPage list even if it came up number one in my search.
Fanie, are you suggesting that Yellow page advertising even on the internet is still viable? I do not understand why people would take the extra effort to go to a yellow page site and then search a business why not just search for a business in your browser?!
Google, Bing, etc all offer affordable advertising solutions and it is where 99% of people are searching.
Here is a good article: https://openforum.hbs.org/challenge/understand-digital-transformation-of-business/why-digital/digital-loser-that-just-won-t-die-yellow-page-print-directories/comments
I look forward to your response!
Before you walk out the door look into a mirror to see is this your best presentation of you? Why can't your business reflect the image you see in the mirror?