It is always interesting when the new Yellow Pages comes out, to see who is still advertising there, but still has a poor online presence. And it is interesting to see whether the businesses spending money on Yellow Pages ads are targeting the right keywords online.
Yes, if your target audience is primarily offline, the Yellow Pages is great. I’m talking about the chunky yellow phone book (that is a lot less chunky than it was when I was a kid). The Yellow Pages works great for business like retirement villages, where the target audience might prefer to sit with a physical book rather than looking online.
But for a vast majority of businesses, having a good online presence is vital. It is important that people can find you quickly and easily through search engines like Google. But you need to know what people are searching for.
An example of not using the right keywords
I’ll give you an example. It isn’t a great example. because I’m not going to “name and shame” the business, but you’ll get the idea.
This business is in the business of renovating kitchens. They have a large advertisement in the Yellow Pages, and a small website that has “Powered By Yellow” at the bottom. They also have a Facebook page.
The website did not appear on the first page of Google when I searched for the business name (and I am in the same city as this business). It appeared at position 10 on page 1 for the word “joiner” followed by the city name. The website was optimised for the keyword “kitchen renovation” followed by the city name, and appeared at position 1, which is great.
The way I found the website was via the Facebook page, but since not everyone uses Facebook, that is not the best way to get traffic to your site.
But when I look on https://google.com/trends , the number of searches in this country in the last 12 months for “joiner” is twice as high as for “kitchen renovation”. I have no reason to believe that searches with my city’s name at the end would be any different.
You need to at least rank for your business name
So here we have a website that people don’t find on Google if they search for the business name. This is awful for referrals. Your friend has had some kitchen work done, and you ask “Who was the joiner?”. They tell you the business name, and you look it up on Google. Nothing.
So you look up “joiner” followed by the city. And there are 9 other entries before the one you are looking for, all there to tempt you into clicking.
So what are the right keywords?
Your website needs to rank for the right keywords. The best keywords to rank for are your business name (which should be super easy, if yours is the only business in town with that name), and the top three search terms that people enter into Google when searching for a business like yours.
Don’t be fooled into setting up a business website that only ranks for one search term.
Not an isolated case
I thought I would check another joiner in the same Yellow Pages, to see if the one I found was unique.
No. There was another one that has a website “Powered by Google”. And, guess what? It didn’t appear on page 1 for the business name either. Nor did it appear on page 1 for “joiner” followed by the city name. I finally found it at position 7 for “kitchen manufacturer” followed by the suburb name (not the city name).
Let’s talk
If you need help with (1) working out what keywords you should be ranking for and (2) setting up a professional website that will be found on Google for the terms people are actually searching for, get in touch.
