Why Yellow Pages is dead - long live the gardening blog

Can anyone tell me when the last time you went to that whopping great big yellow book and made a list of potential gardeners or landscapers that you wanted to call from it?

My company placed adverts with Yellow Pages to the tune of £4,000 per year - yes that is a massive £76.00 per week and, if you take an employees wages into consideration, I was employing one person just to pay for this advert.

Yellow Pages is now a really dead medium and I would advise anyone who runs a gardening or landscaping business to think very very carefully before committing hard earned profits to your advertising that does not include the internet.

Blogs and social media is now the most effective medium to take your business forward. It is not necessary to pay to have a listing in any form of paper directory.

I know that you are going to argue that the Yellow Pages will put you into a regional book and it will narrow down your potential projects to customers that are local to you.

However, I will argue, and win the argument, that I can write about a local business, draw in local key words and almost guarantee that anyone searching within a certain location will discover the post very quickly.

For example, if I headed a post: Landscape services on the Isle Of Skye, catering for all garden maintenance and garden construction services, I would almost (note the caveat) always come to the very top of the search results if someone on the Isle of Skye was looking for a gardener or landscaper.

However, this could be you. I have worked hard, with the help of my friend Craig McGinty, to establish Landscape Juice as a premier UK site for landscape and gardening advice and tips. Many hours have been spent typing out gardening facts,advice and information.

You can achieve similar results if you participate by creating an maintaining a blog. You do not have to spend as long as me in discovering the power of your writing but if you concentrate on using keywords and locality which is your patch, you can quickly rise above your competitors or peers without shelling out a penny.

Blogger from Google is free and after six months, as long as you post on a regular basis, they will start to send the relevant searchers to your blog.

Keep your customers up to date with what you are doing and what you can provide and I predict, your business will benefit.

Remember, you will only get back what you put in, but, you do not have to pay for expensive SEO and certainly not Yellow Pages adverts.

Further Reading: Creating a successful Gardening Blog

Comments

[Richard Boyd]

Yellow Pages & Thomson are both business models that are dying and their web presense is not well placed, too little too late. We stopped using them 2 years ago because it made little if any difference to our income.

Long tail searches are very easy to rank for just a carefully worded title in the landscaping & design space should be enough.

Not sure I'd recommend Blogger from a business or SEO/SEM perspective, Word Press or Drupal are far better options IMHO.