How SEO is Just Like The Yellow Pages

When it really comes down to it, SEO and local SEO is inbound marketing. Much like a Yellow Pages ad, they represent a way to get your business in front of interested consumers in a time of need for your products and services.

With Yellow Page ads (remember them?), as in most forms of advertising media, you can simply pay to appear. You choose your ad size, pay the bill, which was added to your monthly phone bill, and you were good for a year. The sales reps suggested to you "to go horizontal" If you've been in business long enough, you remember the YP reps suggesting "all the other headings" in the book people may look under to find your type of business. SEO is no different. It's researching phrases people have commonly looked for that are relevant to your business and area served, and performing on-page and off-page SEO to make  as sure as possible you are properly represented on the search return pages.

SEO is a little different than the phone book. There is a whole technical process to follow in an effort to improve your visibility and to appear in the local organic search results for your business. This shifts the focus away from the traditional advertising and marketing mindset and more toward unlocking the mystery of strong local search rankings.

The purpose of this post is to help local businesses address this mindset switch.

Back in the mid 80’s to the mid 90’s Yellow Page advertising was a monster money maker for phone companies. In middle markets like Rochester NY, the book even had to be spit up into two books, a white with phone numbers and a yellow with the ads. $34 million dollars of ads (in 1991 dollars) for a book that cost Rochester Telephone (now Frontier) a little over $2 million to print and distribute.

What's more frustrating is that in 1991, the average Rochester business owner spent $361 a month advertising in the phone book. That's $755 in today's dollars. Yet most businesses don't even spend even a small fraction of that in SEO, or more importantly local SEO, which accomplishes the exact same thing as phone books back in the day. For this reason (among others), small business are falling farther and farther behind.

The goal today is still to achieve local visibility, but more importantly, it’s to put the marketing back into marketing. With the internet now untethered from the desk and now in pockets and purses, searches on the local level have increased over 44X what they were just 3 years ago.

Too Much Marketing and Too Little SEO

If we can all agree that SEO and Local SEO is just a form of marketing, then we can likely agree that endlessly buying into search engines that no one has even heard of, or buying some spam links on a link farm is not marketing. SEO makes sure your business really looks the part on those Google and Bing searches. It's especially important to rank on the first page of results (or as close as possible) for your key terms and long-tails, and ensuring that this content may actually drive business — now that is marketing.

Marketing is every bit of communication you have with the outside world. Marketing is the name of your business, the products and services you sell, your location, logo, branding, website, email signatures and even how you answer the phone. Marketing is your page titles, URL, meta descriptions, keyword density, etc., and most importantly, relevant content, so you show in search engine listing returns. Marketing is every touch point you have with a customer.

In other words, your brand, website, social profiles and activity, Google My Business, Bing For Business, Google Maps, Bing Maps, and of course your appearance in search returns for pertinent queries, are all part of your marketing, and without using someone that does SEO all day long, it can fail.

In the past, a well-placed advertisement will still fail to drive business if the marketing basics are not in place. Likewise, a well-positioned website without a focus on core SEO marketing principles will also fail to generate business. Take the example of meta descriptions. That’s the 155 characters you have under your listing in Google (115 on a smartphone) Meta descriptions don’t directly influence rankings, but they surely influence how your search listing looks to a potential site visitor, which may determine whether it’s clicked or passed over, even if it was #1 on the first page.

That’s just one small (but important) example of what the right marketing company can do.

All of your marketing must pull in the same direction — SEO, local SEO, PPC, content marketing and social media, as well as any outbound marketing done in the physical world. This is a strategic, long-term effort, and the synergy created here ensures that every channel contributes and punches above its weight. The goal is to have one strategically aligned marketing strategy across both the digital and physical landscapes.

Be Patient

Are you married? Have you ever run a marathon? Build ships in a bottle? Paint portraits? Things that are worth doing require commitment, and your marketing is no different. You must be committed to ensuring your site is perfectly optimized. You must be committed to generating good local SEO exposure and links. You must be committed to building your online presence and reputation. You must me committed to building you digital authority in your field. You must be committed to revising and refining your strategy, rain or shine.

Finally, if you’ve never read “Successful Advertising” by Thomas Smith, here is his overview.

1. The first time people look at any given ad, they don't even see it.
2. The second time, they don't notice it.
3. The third time, they are aware that it is there.
4. The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they've seen it somewhere before.
5. The fifth time, they actually read the ad.
6. The sixth time they thumb their nose at it.
7. The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with it.
8. The eighth time, they start to think, "Here's that confounded ad again."
9. The ninth time, they start to wonder if they're missing out on something.
10. The tenth time, they ask their friends and neighbors if they've tried it.
11. The eleventh time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
12. The twelfth time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
13. The thirteenth time, they start to feel the product has value.
14. The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting a product exactly like this for a long time.
15. The fifteenth time, they start to yearn for it because they can't afford to buy it.
16. The sixteenth time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
17. The seventeenth time, they make a note to buy the product.
18. The eighteenth time, they curse their poverty for not allowing them to buy this terrific product.
19. The nineteenth time, they count their money very carefully.
20. The twentieth time prospects see the ad, they buy what is offering.

Written by

Mark Cordy