If no one is using it, why is it still being produced? The answer is because people keep advertising in it. Why would people advertise in an ineffective marketing medium? The answer may be because they have always advertised in the Yellow Pages. But more than likely, it is because their rep showed them some figures on key words and activity on yellowpages.com, the search engine that is packaged with those printed ads in the book to entice businesses to keep advertising. The devil is in the details – like the ones they are not sharing with you. How do they really compare to other search engines – like the King Kong of all search engines – Google? What they tell you may be different than what your own web statistics are telling you. For instance, I did a quick check of the analytics of our clients. I looked at the referring sites statistics and found that searches for those web sites using Google outnumber searches using yellowpages.com about 10 to 1. Before you bite on the Yellow Pages – or any of the other look alike phone books that are still being produced – check your own web statistics.

But let’s not just pick on the phone book and their search engines. There are a host of SEO strategies and companies waiting to take your money to drive more leads your way. When is a pay-per-click worth it and when can you get more bang for your buck by using an organic search method of marketing your web site? Organic strategies rely on search engines to find your site based on the content of your site without paying for clicks, ads or any other referral fees. Again, I would encourage you to take a look at your web stats. Analytics software is typically free to use. Google has their version, as do most of the major search engines. Many times your ISP will have some sort of analytics software for you as well. This simply keeps track of the number of visitors to your site, what pages they looked at, how long they were on the site, etc. The key statistic you need to find is the referring sites. This will tell you how people are finding you: by a search engine, from another web site, or without a referring site (in other words, they just enter your url or have you bookmarked from a previous visit.) If you have a relatively high number of visits from referring search engines, you may be happy with the amount of traffic that is generated organically. However, if your search engine traffic is not what you would like, you may want to pay for certain key word and phrase searches. In this case, I would encourage you to take a look at the search engines that are showing up the highest in your stats. Don’t be suckered into using paying for a search engine that is just a fraction of your current web traffic.