Yellow Pages? No Thanks.

Last week as I was meeting with a heating and cooling contractor, he mentioned how the Yellow Page advertising he had relied on for 50 years was no longer affordable. It costs more than ever and produces less each year.

I wrote about this this summer, click here.

And check this out from offcoarse.com:

Local Search and the Fall of Yellow Pages

This post was inspired by Andrew Shotland and his post about the fall of “Yellow pages” searches. His graphs he created with Google insights let him see that less people are searching for the term “Yellow Pages”.

I saw the graph and recreated my own. I saw the trend he was talking about. The interesting thing I found was that less people were searching for the generic term “Yellow Pages”, and even “CitySearch” but more were searching for “Yelp”. So why, and what does it mean?

In the above graph the Yellow line is YELP.com, the Green Line is “Auto Repair”, the light blue line is “CitySearch”, the Blue and Red line is “Yellowbook” and “YellowPages.com”.

So lets see what does this tell us? If you look a the Total number of searches they have gone up. There are more people searching for these terms now than before as a whole. However the base line “Auto Repair” has stayed for the most part constant.

It pretty much follows all of the other lines in respect to peaks and valley’s other than YELP, and CitySeach at the end of the graph. Look at YELP. They started out with very few users, then increased. Their search has followed, and people are searching for them via the word “YELP”.

So why are others not being searched for? Is it a product offering issue? The issue is not less people searching that is for sure, so it has to be the way we are searching and our level of sophistication in our searches.

The internet increases its user base every day, that is a FACT. Each time a new user comes on they have a learning curve of how to search the internet. When they start they might use the idea, of “OH i want to see the yellow pages on line”. That very well might be their search then, lets search for “Yellow Pages”.

Once they have played with the internet and found other offerings they will soon come to see there are more sites which offer the same if not much better information to them about what they are searching for other than what they originally thought. Soon they will find they can put in their exact term and find “Auto Repair 30306″ or “Tire Repair in Roswell” and find a much cleaner result.

BUT WAIT “YellowPages” has risen over time not decreased. Yes that is true, however the term “Yellow Pages” which is different than “YellowPages” has dramatically decreased, the term (”Yellow Pages”)is so large that we can’t put in on the same graph or else it will out shadow the other lines on the graph.

The increase in the “YellowPages” is small and could even be contributed to their large offline advertising campaigns on the TV and the first time Internet users searching for the term “YellowPages” because they don’t know any better yet.

This theory is sound in the fact that people are becoming more sophisticated in their searching. They are finding out to let Google do the work for them in finding the best place to find the information they want. You can see some what of a correlation between the small increase in the search term “Auto Repair” with similar decrease in “CitySearch” and “YellowPages”.

So then why the increase in YELP searches. That is a great question and my answer has to be product offering. They offer a much better product, not to mention a iphone app. You have to see the increase in their search term as an effective marketing and branding campaign which the others have not tried yet. Yelp is centered in consumer reviews, not just listings (which by themselves suck).

Consumers are saying right here on the graph, give us good content lots of it, and we will search for your site, because we like your product, and how you present it.

I think the “Yelp” sign is just as much a wake up call to catch up to what they are doing as the graph is a wake up call to “Yellow Pages” to stop spending all that money on offline TV ads, they aren’t working. In closing as more people become more sophisticated in their searching local search is going to become a much more heated topic, because people will just know to let Google say which sites provides the best content for your search. Simple as that.

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