Monthly Archives: November 2012

Yellow Pages Advertising – Just, Don’t Do It.

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The horror stories I have heard from clients and the cringeworthy phone conversations I have had with some of the YellowPages sales reps made me write this post. For any Australian business who is about to sign up again with YellowPages for a staggering amount of money per year, please read this article. I’ll be sharing some examples of what YP sales reps have been telling our clients in order to get them to sign up again.

Most of the stories involve YP reps misleading people by making some of the following claims (lies):

YP rep: “If you do not sign up with us again this year, you will disappear from the Google rankings. We work together with Google on the organic listings. In fact, we have official Google staff working right here in our office, they make sure that all YellowPages clients get better rankings. Cancel your contract and see what happens to your rankings.”

Misleading, bullying and scaring people into signing up for a “service” for which real ROI is very hard to track and where more often than not, clients pay an absolute premium for terribly poor results, compared to other available online advertising possibilities. Have a look at the following set of screenshots which I took from several SEO clients who are currently locked in with Yellowpages Advertising contracts. These are all from the last 30 days.

Yellowpages.com.au accounted for 1.16% in the last 30 days according to Google Analytics. Google sent our client 62.49% of their total traffic.

This client got 1.23% traffic from YP over the past 30 days. Google was responsible for 77.50%

Here we see 53.42% organic traffic from Google. 19.39% PPC (Adwords) traffic from Google and then there’s 1.07% coming from Yellowpages.

I could go on and make a really long list of screenshots because I have access to over 800 client profiles, but I hope you get the picture. Google Search is the new Yellow Pages and companies should really shift their marketing budget in order to stay in touch with their target market.

The biggest concern I have is that for the above “results”, clients have told me they’ve been paying Yellowpages anywhere from 8,000 to 38,000 AUD per year. If businesses were willing to move that budget towards search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, their sales would go through the roof, quite literally.

Wake up business people; The Yellow Pages is an online dinosaur and their inevitable demise is only getting prolonged by those of you who still bottle-feed them the biggest chunks from your valuable marketing budget.

Interesting (hand picked) reads across the web about Yellow Pages Advertising: