Free Range Search
Hold the preservatives on that listing! The consumer is wise to the ingredients on that label called "Sponsored" or as the world has come to know PPC advertising.
Internet advertising will continue to gain momentum as companies continue pull away from traditional print media and shift their dollars towards the WWW. Tissue paper advertising like the telephone book still provides the perfect medium for "local" mom and pop businesses like Jack's Leaky Plumbing LLC. Where the new wave has been forming is the placement of natural listings on the search engines. As the World Wide Web expands and contracts every few minutes with the birth of a web template, it's more important than ever to hire a professional firm to help you stand out in the crowd. Real web pages consist of a unique design and a marketing component that will organically or naturally list your company higher in the search engines.
Wild Caught vs. Farm Raised
Forrester Research only confirms such prognostications from WEBPRO by saying 84 to 85 percent of the B2B and B2C decision makers (and let's face it, we're all consumers) depend on the organic listings over the farm raised PPC. In other words, consumer reports confirm that people have a higher trust factor in the natural or organic listings and ignore the "Sponsored" programs from Google, Yahoo or MSN.
The evidence that keeps surfacing year after year is that online sales are less consistent with PPC but higher and more qualified, leading to larger up-sell items with natural listings.
Like a Rock
Google's stock continues to drop primarily due to the fact they weren't able to sell or maintain subscriber levels or as AP reports "4Q profit missed analyst target this past January". A splinter cell division of Hearst Publishing came to WEBPRO International's office and tried to show us their "New Internet Ad Campaign". One of their sales reps touted "We purchased bulk keywords from Google". I hated throwing cold water on his sales pitch, but I said your model is going to fail because people looking for Jack's Leaky Plumbing are more likely to pick up the phone book, contact their local chamber or go to Angie's List. Coming in for the second round of salt I said, you'll spend more money chasing customer service issues with disgruntled customers that expected some degree of performance. He said that was already true.
We're seeing Yellow page and PPC models ( in my opinion ), leaky at best. These inefficiencies force the customer to jump through too many hoops to root for your company online.
It's more than likely you may be soon (if not already) goated into paying ridiculous monthly fees in hopes of being listed on the first page if not outbidded by your competitor on the yellow pages. That's right, the YellowPages.com plays a similar game like Yahoo and Google when it comes to placement except their monthly fees can be even more expensive.
Before signing, ask the rep of the company what the "Point System" is and how that will affect your placement in their online directory. You maybe disappointed to know their point system is based on the level of print advertising you spend. Basically, the more you spend, the higher your presence in their directory. Not a good trade off in my opinion because you have to pay for that too.
My Advice, go organic. You'll get healthier results.
it would seem the writing is on the wall for a new surge in finding experienced web development firms and not template driven assembly web huts for cheap hire.
Remember, cheap is as cheap does.