According to Greg Sterling, the top 10 Internet Yellow Pages headings in terms of what local people search for are:

1. Restaurants
2. Physicians & Surgeons
3. Hotels
4. Auto Repairing & Service
5. Florists-Retail
6. Auto Dealers-New & Used
7. Dentists
8. Auto Parts & Supplies - New & Used
9. Beauty Salons (tie)
10. Hospitals (tie)

So what’s that mean? Well, for starters, if you own a local restaurant then you should seriously start thinking about advertising your business through the Internet yellow pages. That includes sites like Citysearch, Superpages, and Yelp. The same goes for doctors and surgeons and hotels. In fact, if you do business in any of the above categories then you would benefit from advertising in the yellow pages online.

More and more people are ditching the old print yellow pages and searching for local businesses online. When searching for real estate, most people start their search online. Tourists looking for a place to stay or eat turn to the Internet. Search Engine Land has a pretty in-depth post about the differences between local online searches and off line searches for businesses. There are plenty of similarities. But I think the real issue here is not whether you should advertise in print or online, but rather how you can incorporate Internet Yellow Pages advertising with what you are already doing in print.

Learn more about integrated marketing from Melberg.com.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: internet yellow pages, local small business marketing, online advertising

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:53 am and is filed under Integrated Marketing, Local Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.