Let’s start at square one on this topic.  Before we even talk about what you want to write about in your website, we need to understand what it is your customers will search for.  The question to ask yourself is, “What will my customer type into the search box in the search engine?” 

Be careful, because it may not be what you think.  For example, insurance agents tend to talk about “auto insurance” while insurance customers tend to search for info on “car insurance” – at a clip of about 40:1!  So if an insurance agent has lots of information about auto insurance on his website and his potential customers keep asking Google to teach them about car insurance, the likelihood that they’ll find his website at all is almost zero.  So be careful in choosing your sites wording that you utilize the words that your customers use.

In addition to the terms that people use, you’ll also want to add (more…)

Many small business owners spend a major chunk (as much as 100%!) of their advertising budget in the local yellow pages.  Many give little thought to the return they should expect from these advertising dollars – in fact many that I talk to initally don’t even consider these costs to be advertising.  “It’s just something a business has to do” is a comment I hear on a regular basis.

This lack of attention allows your friendly phone book rep to foist some myths and legends on you if you aren’t careful.  Here is a run down of the most common – and what the yellow pages own readership data has to say about them.

Traditionally, there is a lot of stress around a business owner’s interaction with her yellow page rep.  This is scripted by the rep to make the negotiations to their advantage.  Here are a list of  issues that you may often be mislead about:

You have to make your decision now. 

There is no fire.  The phone book is planned months in advance.  However, if you do make a snap decision on this, you are doing your rep a huge favor.  They have hundreds of businesses to squeeze see and typically are in your market for only a few weeks.  Therefore, if they can get you to sign in the first meeting, they can cross you off their list and move on to the next one.  However, (more…)