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The Slow, Tragic Death Of Yellow Pages Advertising

Phone Books—Day One:

Phone Books—Day Two:

One of my employees snapped these photos outside of his apartment building. Those are phonebooks a Yellow Pages employee leaves in the hallway of the building a few times a year.

None of the tenants ever takes one.

This stack of phone books was particularly unlucky. Someone in the building was moving out, and they used the phonebooks to prop open the hallway door. The tenant forgot to move the phonebooks back, so they were left out overnight.

As you can see from the second picture, it rained. Hard.

Welcome to the 21st century… where people find the phonebook more useful as a doorstop than a business directory.

The pictures above are almost poetic. Since 2002, the international yellow pages industry has seen its value plummet by 50%. And I bet you can guess why.

(Hint: It’s that internet thing you’re using to read this email right now.)

Gone are the days when a contractor’s phone would ring off the hook because of an effective and well-placed yellow-pages advertisement.

Here to stay are search engines, online business directories, and getting the vast majority of inbound leads from the internet.

I’m not saying yellow pages advertising is a total waste of money for absolutely every company in the world. It can still work for some small-town companies whose client base consists of older folks who don’t “internet.”

But if you’re in the other 99% of companies, and phonebooks are your PRIMARY method of advertising (or, worse, your ONLY method of advertising), you need to seriously reconsider your marketing priorities.

Here’s why…

First, advertising in yellow pages nowadays will likely net you a negative return on investment.

Like I said earlier, very few leads come from phonebooks anymore. And yellow pages advertising can be surprisingly expensive… especially when compared to high-return online endeavors like SEO or PPC.

Second, there is a newer, better, yellow pages out there. EVERYONE uses it—not just stubborn grandparents who refuse to get a computer and internet connection.

It’s called Google.

The latest data shows that 97% of people now search for local businesses online.

Ninety-seven percent!

Google (and Bing, too) has supplanted traditional ink-and-paper phonebooks and directories. That’s obvious.

What is not as obvious to some contractors is that merely having a website is good enough to get you into Google’s good graces and onto page one.

To make page one, you have to have a sophisticated plan of attack. Unlike the phonebook, getting the first listing isn’t as simple as naming your company “ABC Remodeling” or “Aardvark Contracting.”

If you’re doing SEO, you need to do the following just for a fighting chance to be on page one:

  • Keyword research and analysis
  • Doc type analysis
  • Optimization of title tags of all important pages
  • Optimization of other meta tags (Description etc…)
  • Optimization of header tags H1, H2, and H3
  • Analysis of bold tag
  • Optimizing JavaScript and CSS codes
  • Optimization of non-index able attributes like Frames
  • Optimizing HTML source code
  • Image optimization
  • Hyperlink optimization
  • Optimizing internal linking structure
  • Optimization of external links
  • Blog Setup
  • Literally over a dozen other highly technical things

And if you’re doing PPC, you need to do just as many complicated “tech-y” things. But the list is COMPLETELY different.

Basically… if you don’t have PhD-levels of knowledge about SEO and PPC—and you try to do it all by yourself anyway—you’re internet-marketing efforts are dead in the water.

But don’t throw your computer against the wall in frustration yet. Hope is not lost.

MYM is the authority for comprehensive online marketing solutions for contractors and remodelers. And our crack team of SEO and PPC Einsteins will do ALL the work for you.

From SEO to PPC to Online Reputation Management, we perform every necessary measure (and then some) required for our clients to experience total internet-marketing domination.

This is why some of the companies that unequivocally trust MYM with their online marketing include…

  • The nation’s largest independently owned exterior remodeling company
  • The nation’s largest independently owned HVAC company
  • Dozens upon dozens of small- to medium-sized businesses that value results and outstanding service

But don’t just become a client because of that. Let us PROVE that we “walk the talk.”

Our no-cost Contractor Lead Generation & Marketing Audit is the best way for you to determine if MYM is the right online marketing company for you. We’ll dig deep into your internet marketing efforts, expose what’s not working, and then provide you with actionable steps to fix the problem(s).

It’s all complimentary… and you can find out more about it here: https://www.mymonline.com/why-you-need-mym/web-marketing-audit.

Thanks!

-Rich

© 2018, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.

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