Yellowpages.ca has rolled up its sleeves and put some hard work into improving its online offering, but God bless them, they didn’t hire us and it still sucks. What you really want to know is will a listing in yellowpages.ca improve your search engine optimization?
The answer is: marginally and at a high cost.
Since I hammered Yellow Pages in the spring on their sales techniques versus performance (see Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow: Why You Can Pass on Yellowpages.ca), we’ve been getting more and more traffic from hapless souls wondering if their advertising dollars are being put to good use.
For those businesses, I wanted to focus this article on what exactly an online listing in Yellow Pages gets you from a SEO perspective.
How Directory Listings Increase Your SEO
Directory listings give you valuable backlinks. And the higher ranking the site, the better the quality of the backlink.
To determine ranking, first Google evaluates the directory site itself. Google determines the site’s page rank by considering the number of indexed pages, its popularity, traffic, keyword density, and its own backlinks velocity (the number of web properties linking to it). If the directory site ranks well on a chosen subject then websites that link out from it will get a boost in ranking on that subject.
The strength of the boost is determined by the quality of the link itself. For example, if a high ranking site provides a link to you that is full of relevant keywords (either in the link itself or in the surrounding text), the impact is higher than if the link has generic, non relevant text in it. The more content on the directory site that relates to your business, the better.
How Does Yellow Pages Rank?
Yellowpages.ca has a PR 7 which is nothing to sneeze at. The site has 2,600 Google approved backlinks and a breath-taking 3.1 MILLION indexed pages. In layman’s terms, yellowpages.ca kicks online ass.
And yet, they fail to rank in Google for the industries the serve. This begs the question, how badly do they have to not know what they’re doing to manage that? They should rank in their sleep. Their lunch order should appear on page one.
But, alas. It doesn’t.
A Real Business Example: Cosmetic Dentistry
To get us out of the abstract, let’s choose the highly competitive field of cosmetic dentistry to shed some light on the digital performance of yellowpages.ca
I go to yellowpages.ca and enter “cosmetic dentistry” and “Toronto, ON” as my region.
I’m choosing Denistry On Wynford as my example because it is a full listing with all the Yellow Pages bells and whistles including website, ad, video, and photos. Dentistry on Wynford clearly cares about their marketing and have used all the opportunities offered to them through yellowpages.ca
The first thing to note is that there is very little content on this page. This is the primary reason why Yellow Pages doesn’t rank for anything. They can’t because they are not about anything. Google loves content. The more words talking about a subject you have, the better Google will rank you for that subject.
But on this listing, any real information about the business (and therefore, on the subject) is buried beneath the fold and is very tiny and stilted. Instead of giving businesses 2 paragraphs or so to describe themselves and what they offer, they are forced to conform to one word answers in cookie cutter categories dictated by Yellow Pages like “Business Hours” and “Brands Offered”. These categories are the same if you are in furnace repair or stereo systems.
Next, if you were to look at the source code, you’d see that it is a javascript jungle in there with no heading tags whatsoever. Google looks for linking text and H1-H6 tags (headings) to get a sense of what the page is really about. Yellow Pages uses custom CSS class names like “business name” instead of standard heading tags, hurting their SEO.
Making the default main content a video (or worse a graphic image of a print ad) with no supporting text is a mistake. While Google likes the interactive qualities of video, if there is not enough supporting text and the video itself is not optimized, its impact on ranking is nominal.
Google’s new Caffeine algorithms really likes user interaction. Yellow Pages has implemented a review system but the system has no reviews. They have Facebook integration but have no “Likes” on their pages. They can tell me how many millions of users they have every month until they turn blue, but a site with no signs of life tells me there is no engagement. And why is there no engagement? Because there is no content. In other words, what’s to like? A list of brand names?
Of the items in the listing tabs, they are all things that are considered supporting content to Google, not primary content. The only content Google can read from an image is the alt tag and the name of the image file. That means, from and SEO perspective, the ad, photos and website preview are all useless. The only relevant content is the business details which are stark at best.
Does a Listing In Yellow Pages Help My Ranking At All?
What you need to know is the most valuable thing yellowpages.ca has to offer you is a live link to your website. Despite their SEO ineptitude, they have achieved a PR 7 and a link from a PR 7 site is a big deal. Even an indirect link (which is what they offer) will raise you up in Google’s esteem. Because this is the only real SEO benefit they offer, I find it particularly disappointing that the linking text says “Website” rather than keyword anchor text like “Toronto Cosmetic Dentist” or even the name of the business.
Our business example Dentistry on Wynford is on page 2 of our “Toronto Cosmetic Dentist” Google search. This is just as likely because of the total online marketing efforts the business has made as on their investment in Yellow Pages. Of the Toronto cosmetic dentists who invested in a premium listing on yellowpages.ca, less than half of them appear on the first 5 pages of Google.
The Cost of Backlinks
When I say Yellow Pages doesn’t rank, I mean at all. It is vital to note that within our example of “Toronto Cosmetic Dentistry” not a single Yellow Pages listing showed up in the first 50 pages of Google results. There are between 10-12 results per page which means Yellow Pages didn’t show up within the first 500 search results.
It also important to note that over 30 online business directories did show up in the first 20 pages of Google. So what you should perhaps ask yourself is how much is a PR7 backlink worth to you? An online listing in Yellow Pages can cost you anywhere between $200 and $1,00 a month depending on how many areas you want to cover. For $2,500 a year, you could likely get listed on all 30 of the ranking directories (good for any search performed with “Toronto” in the keywords) and you would gain 30 backlinks for the price of 1. Many directories are free because they make their money from Google content advertising, not from the businesses they list. And there are many opportunities for backlinks from PR7 and higher websites that are free if you know where to look and what to do.
So, the answer is yes, Yellow Pages does improve your Google page rank. But at what cost?
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This is good to know. I don’t know much about seo. Thanks for the interesting and important information. Great article! I learned a lot.
You’re welcome Darell. I’m glad you found it useful! We’re going to be adding more SEO how to’s to our blog this year. Let me know if you have any specific questions for us to cover.
Great article Angie. Note, there are several local directories out there which do have pretty good page rank and which also offer opportunities for customers to create online reviews. It’s a matter of determining which of these will provide the best backlink/local search optimization value and then prioritizing accordingly. Analytics will be key to measuring these and other long term SEO strategies.
I agree. It’s only because of the power of the Yellow Pages brand that business owners feel that this is a good use of their money. It’s a real shame that they don’t use that brand loyalty to their advantage by offering an outstanding product.
It’s great to see that SEO experts agree. A Google place page, Yelp.ca reviews, these are all great ways to improve your SEO and make your business interactive without being gauged every month.
Thanks for the comment!
Our Yellow Page rep. is meeting me this week and I am going to tell him that we are dropping our $900/month plumbing ad in the yellow book and just going to buy a link to our site which is much more cheaper and effective option. We get 0-1 call a month from that yellow pages ad if we are lucky. It is a total waste of money no matter what the salesmen try and tell you. Its sad when the reason why I will pay for a link on Yellow Pages is to improve my ranking on Google (a site that actually makes me money) and i honestly expect little to no business directly from that yellow page link. They boast about having the Yellow Pages app. but I honestly think that their app is terrible. Since it only displays information that the company’s pay for you will be using the app to find a store or service only having to open up your web browser and googling the company’s name to visit their website. This is because if the company does not pay Yellow Pages to display their link it will not appear on their website or on the app. This makes the app very user unfriendly and will only limited the user to what ever information the listing company chooses to pay for. I cant tell you how much of a pain it is to use this app to find a close by restaurant and then having to hunt for their website online because the company didn’t buy the link, versus using a free local listing app where all the companies information is displayed which avoids this Yellow head ache of being limited to what ever information the company paid for. It really makes you question why you even bother to use an app which only gives you some of the information about a company, when you you can just use the Google Places app. which will give you everything (including links to their websites).
You bet it does! Google has now added all of YP to places and those listings come up first always!
Even listings that don’t have websites rank at the top cause of being in the Yellow Pages……….hmmm Organic searches go to the bottom of the list asr google and the yps join upcontrol the information flow at the top? hmmmmm wonder if congress knows about this?
Found out that we company needed to get a yellow page ad and then might make the first page.
Additionally if you have a Yellow Page Advert it looks like you can spam any category on Google Places. It appears to be happening in our case.
My business regularly got calls from people who found us on google maps. This suddenly and drastically stopped (quite recently…probably mid October 2011). To my dismay, it looks like Google is getting their Maps listings from yellowpages. Is this new? I agree with David, posted above; although our website performs really well on organic searches, we’re being beaten by really weak websites who subscribe to yellowpages and get placed on the maps listings. What should I do? Call yellowpages and let them rip me off so I get listed on Google Maps?
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