Small businesses often have a very small advertising budget. I recently had a client who was paying almost two thousand dollars a month for a spot on Yellow Pages website. The salesperson who sold the ad advised them they would be in the number one spot on the Yellow Page website in their area. The owner thought this was amazing and thought the customers would come in by the thousands. I talked them into letting me add a website tracker to their site to see what their customer base was.

Two weeks later, he couldn’t believe the reports he was seeing. The website was getting less than 10 visits a day, most of them from search engines and not from the Yellow Pages website. He was also tracking the number of phone calls and asking where they got information about the business. Most stated they found his website using a search engine and clicking on his website.

I showed him there are nearly 2.4 billion searches on Google every month and the Yellow Pages site couldn’t compare to that. For a fraction of the price, his business could be on the first page on Google search and get more traffic then the Yellow Pages website could ever provide. We sat down and came up with some keywords that he felt customers would type into Google to find his business. Within months he was ranking on the first page for many of those words and was getting almost triple the amount of traffic per day for a fraction of the price.

To those small business owners that are looking for a less expensive way to expose your business to a large customer base, remember that most people are using search engines to find information. A small number of people are looking in places like the Yellow Page, so why pay a large amount for a small amount of exposure.

Tags: Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Small Business, Yellow Pages