Have you had a thought along these lines: “Wow, if I could have seen the internet boom coming in 1994, I would be a billionaire!”   While I can’t promise you private islands or tuxedo’d butlers, I can help point you in the direction of growing your business far and away faster than your competition.

While the internet has been around for seemingly ages, only recently have people started turning to it to make their purchasing decisions, from where to eat lunch, to who cleans their teeth, to where to buy a house. Potential customers trust online reviews of your business second only to word-of-mouth references and more than they trust your advertising. They go to the web to decide between you and the 50 other Crystal Lake Dentists. And they’re doing so in droves.

Local Business’s Response? In 2009, less than half of local-based small businesses had a website. Many have no clue as to the importance of online reviews. And far far far fewer are reaching out to their customers via social media.

This is the opportunity that has presented itself today.  In 5 years, it will be painfully obvious that those that adapted to the changing landscape of how local businesses get found will have done very well for themselves. They will have seized this opportunity to build a lot of trust with their customers and will have taken a big chunk of the marketshare that was up for grabs.

In the coming posts, I will do my best to share with you the facets of this opportunity.  In the mean time, there’s a lot you can do to impact your online foot print, with not a lot of time or money.

While I am no longer an accountant by trade, I remain one in spirit, and I still like to look at things through numbers. So, let us take a look at some surprising numbers regarding the current state of local advertising.

In 2009, a study reported that 82% of those surveyed use search engines as a source for local information. 50% said that engines are the first place they looked when starting a local search. 72% of consumers reported using search engines more than they did two years ago, and 35% increased their use of email newsletters as a source of information over the same period.

From those numbers, we know that a significant and increasing herd of folks are moving online. Not only that, they like what they see: 92% of searchers in the same survey said they are happy with the results provided from search engines. Since they are happy with the results, we would expect that they are using other media outlets less.

And we would be right: yellow pages directories, local newspapers, magazines and radio all saw declines, with between 23% and 31% of those polled claiming they use the mediums less than they did two years prior.

By now, you might be a bit worried that you are behind the curve when it comes to web adaptation.

But this time, our hunch is wrong! Only 44% of small businesses even have a website!

Not only are you one of the first on the block to seriously consider your web presence, you are practically a pioneer!

In fact, this lag in adaptation by businesses is an awesome opportunity.

Imagine that the success of a business is a road race, one that lasts the entire course of a business. If the race started 20 or so years ago, everyone was using the yellow pages, the horse and buggy of its time. It was the best available technology; the horse and buggy kept you competitive and served your needs. However, the automobile (a.k.a. the internet) eventually came along. It was much faster and more versatile. It was more difficult to operate at first, and making the switch was not easy, but some did. And as enough of them whizzed by, the business owner began to think, “Maybe there’s something to that contraption.”

And that’s the opportunity in front of us today.  The web is widely used by consumers but under-utilized by small businesses. It is fast, effective and dynamic like the car (but unlike the car, it is cheaper than you expect!).

Sadly there is no website-for-clunkers bill.

In the meantime, give us a call to find out more.

-Craig

I had a client ask me this interesting question the other day, and although I had a (admittedly biased) hunch, I did not have any real data to back up what I thought to be the answer.

Could it still be worth a web advertisement with one of the paper-based operations like the Yellow Pages or Dex, even if their big yellow books are mostly headed toward recycling bins?  (There is a fresh one in mine, right now…)

Data shows that droves are moving online to research their buying decisions, but where exactly are they going? Are they just simply typing what they need into their favorite search engine? Or is “Yellow Pages” so ingrained in their minds that YellowPages.com is the first place they go?

Let Us See Some Graphs.

I could not find any research that had already been done on the subject, so I looked for my own. Google Trends is a tool that allows users to compare the popularity of any number of search terms graphically over time.

I compared Maps.Google.Com to YellowPages.com.  These are the results:

(Maps.Google.Com : red) (YellowPages.com blue)

Two things stuck out to me: Google Maps got (and is getting) huge. And although not as steep, we can also see a slow decline in searches on YellowPages.com.

(As a side note: I didn’t include Dex because the line was too small by comparison.  Picture a third bumpy line along the bottom of the graph.)

What Does It Mean?

Well, to say that we can write off YellowPages.com entirely would be hasty. However, if it is on the decline, there may be a point in the future when it no longer has any significant relevancy.

Now, even though YellowPages.com appears to be on a downward trend, that doesn’t mean that it does not (and will not) have significant traffic well into the short-term future. If the advertising is cheap enough, it just might be worth it.

To find out more, I put in a call to Yellow Pages customer service, and spoke to a friendly customer service rep. He told me that there are a variety of options YP offers for online-only advertising, ranging from about $150-$500/month, depending on the prominence of the ads and the area.

At a conservative $200/month, that’s $2,400/year. Is it worth it? Well, it is hard to draw a conclusion without knowing how much the resulting increase in business is worth to your company.

However, from the chart we can see that Google Maps gets roughly double the traffic of YellowPages.com. Compound this observation with the clear trends for each site, plus the added fact that Google.com is displaying its preference for Google Maps entries by including them at the top of the results for any local search (an example of a local search is “Elgin, IL Dentist”). Additionally, there are multiple search engines returning local results, but only one Yellow Pages. For the expected return from advertising on YellowPages.com to be worth it, getting a high and relevant result in Google Maps and other local search engines better be pretty darn expensive.

Just Call Me Paul Harvey…Not.

I didn’t even see this pitch coming! But, getting a prominent spot in Google Maps is not expensive compared to working with Yellow Pages online. (Think about it: they are a large and old institution with executives, salespeople, and HR people to pay, and then they need to make a profit on top of that.) No doubt that there is room for both online advertising and local search optimization, but as the graph shows: times, they are a changing.

Give us a call to find out more.

-Craig