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Advertising On line
This old chestnut again.
I get the impression these days that more people go on line to find a business than use traditional phone directories such as yellow pages Thomsons or BT. I usually google a company when I am trying to find their contact details and I suspect this is how most people now work.
I have a small advert in Yellow pages (I dropped Thomsons a few years ago) and also pay to be in Yell.com. However, I’m not convinced that yell.com or yellow pages represent value for money any more and I am seriously considering pulling my advertising with them.
I have always been suspicous of people that cold call offering to get my website ranking highly on google but I am now starting to believe that Google is probably the first port of call for most people so I would like to optimise our site to make it easier to find. However, I don’t want it coming up when someone in london is looking for a van livery for example – but do want it coming up when someone local to me is doing a search for the types of products and services we provide.
What’s the best way to move this forward? Should I be using a specialist to optimise my site or is this something I could be doing my self?
As always, I welcome other opinions and advice on this 😀
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25 Replies
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you are probably on the right track. i stopped yellow every thing 5 years ago.
try and find your self on the net to see how easy it is. see google list the sponsored links first now.chris
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Phil
As an old crab, before you promote your website, I would suggest you bring it up to date, you still have vat listed at 17.5%, and get rid of the click here to enter, it brings thoughts of elicit content 😀I mean no disrespect, but if you want to get your listing noticed, then it does need to give a better image when people find it.
Health and Safety signs need to be able to be ordered online, as many other companies now offer that standard,
just my opinion, and with the best intentionsYell.com actually works for me, I have had quite a few enquiries, and now cam alter the content of the add to suit whatever I am promoting
Peter
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phill
quote :and also pay to be in Yell.comif you put in signs West Lothian yell.com does not list you or have i got it wrong
chris
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Thanks Peter – Your advice is well intentioned and you’re right in what you are saying. The site is now about 10 years old (ok it’s been updated a few times but basically it’s the same as it was when first set up and I have been thinking about getting a professional revamp done). You’re not the first to criticise it’s style and content and I appreciate your honesty in telling me this.
I can’t decide about yell.com I was thinking about stopping them but I’m not sure. Yellow pages I think is a waste of time for me as we are on the periphery of our local guide which is targeting Edinburgh and I don’t "do" Edinburgh these days :lol1:
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quote Chris Wool:phillquote :and also pay to be in Yell.com
if you put in signs West Lothian yell.com does not list you or have i got it wrong
chris
No you’re right Chris – I had a recent discusion with yell about this very thing – apparently "I’m not paying them enough to cover all the bases". Type in "Sign Maker Livingston" and we come up.
I was told if I give them more money I can feature more prominantly 😕
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Phil
or any body else for that matter, do a yell search for sign makers in luton,
I should be listed in spot one or two after the national advertisers.
I am not advertising my services but would be good to see if it works, in the context of this threadPeter
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You come up on the first page Peter – 2 after the national listings
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don’t get a specialist to do it phill, they will keel you over and rip you rotten. 😉
update your site, look into search engine optimization with google. they do a bit of a fools walk through tutorial on it i think. (not saying your a fool, just figure of speech) 😀 anyway, do that first, make sure your sites ticking all the boxes for google as they will rank you as good as you have optimized for. make sure every page has your footer info on it. like address etc within your content pages, even if pictures of work. name location and the like… the more the "location" and word "signs" etc is used on each page the easier it will be found for relevant georgraphical content.
even your picture images should be renamed proper as this is another google ticked box.text linking is one of the best ways to rank higher after your content and structure is right. but it is a minefield for folk new to it. again, dont get caught up in these text link exchange schemes… they dont work, you pay heavily further own the line and one foot wrong and google actually demotes your site if your linking to sites they frown upon. so even if you have an excellent site these dodgy text links push you way back.
in a nutshell… go to google and use their own SEO tutorial… its a very good starting point and is free.
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I agree Rob if you need a sign dont go to a specialist they will rip you off rotten, its far better to do it yourself 😀
Peter
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Phil
you come up 5th under signmakers/livingstone, but there is a long list of equally large adds, out of interest what do did you pay yell?
pm if you dont want the world to knowPeter
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I need to look it up Peter – I don’t have the info here but will pm you tomorrow when back at work.
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quote Peter Normington:I agree Rob if you need a sign dont go to a specialist they will rip you off rotten, its far better to do it yourself 😀
Peter
but they are not specialists, mostly conmen with a bit of web knowledge.
if you get a true specialist in this Field you will pay heavily and will be ongoing. spend a couple of hours a night over the next couple of weeks reading up on SEO and you will save yourself allot of money and educate yourself at the same time to further develop your online presence. -
I agree with Peter again here – I never see the point in doing something yourself that a specialist can do better – you are wasting sign making time and will never do the job as well.
I do agree with Rob to a degree too though that web designers etc do to a large degree seem to be bullsh*tters and don’t really know what they are doing – usually the good ones are expensive but the sites work and get ranked well its worth it – its best to get a recommendation there are plenty of really good ones about.
A good site will cost thousands not hundreds – but if you add up all you spend on the tel directory ads Id say its worth it!
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quote Robert Lambie:quote Peter Normington:I agree Rob if you need a sign dont go to a specialist they will rip you off rotten, its far better to do it yourself 😀
Peter
but they are not specialists, mostly conmen with a bit of web knowledge.
if you get a true specialist in this Field you will pay heavily and will be ongoing. spend a couple of hours a night over the next couple of weeks reading up on SEO and you will save yourself allot of money and educate yourself at the same time to further develop your online presence.sounds like some peoples opinion of the sign business!
(edited the above sentence for clarity)If they spent the time and effort to learn it properly then fine,
my point is, if you want it done right, get a professional, and be prepared to pay,Thats what we (as an industry or profession)are always saying, why should any other industry be different?
Yes, Phil could spend hours or weeks learning how to do it, but why not use the time to produce signs, and pay the internet specialist for a better job?
Peter
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I was thinking the same thing as Peter :lol1: Guess there is good and bad in every industry problem is trying to figure out who are the good ones and who are the bad ones. The other problem with Search Engine Optimization is that it keeps changing and so Phill could be forever learning new methods and then keep updating the site.
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i havent much of a clue on the whole structural side to building a website. i have 3, sometimes 4 guys doing work in the background for me…
Content and all else on UKSB is up to me… SEO is up to me… for over 5 years UKSB has more or less dominated the english speaking sign industry online on various forms of ranking. i obviously do not want to elaborate on how i did this, where to find this out, exactly what to do to get there blah blah blah but if i can do it, anyone can… this has cost me nothing but a few hours here and there reading up online… and of course hoping you are making the right decisions.
what you work on today will take about 6 months to become apparent on if it has worked or failed. just remember content is king!oh and i try not to make signs in the evening but i can read from my laptop whilst watching TV and eating my dinner etc. :lol1:
nigel did make a good point on how much it will cost. yeh a few grand budget should do it… and you can easily put that into yellow pages etc on a single year. the trouble is, i know folk that have spent allot of cash and still ended up with a badly coded/optomised site that actually looks pretty professional. but google doesn’t rank you on looks because the bots cant see the cosmetics as such!
oh and don’t go looking at ranking sites such as Alexia and the like… sites like that rank based on "their" toolbar users activity. e.g. if you have a site that’s not visited much by their users it will through up wildly inaccurate reports and i think their site "actually tells you this some place in their "small print".
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quote Robert Lambie:i havent much of a clue on the whole structural side to building a website. i have 3, sometimes 4 guys doing work in the background for me…
Content and all else on UKSB is up to me… SEO is up to me… for over 5 years UKSB has more or less dominated the english speaking sign industry online on various forms of ranking. i obviously do not want to elaborate on how i did this, where to find this out, exactly what to do to get there blah blah blah but if i can do it, anyone can… this has cost me nothing but a few hours here and there reading up online… and of course hoping you are making the right decisions.
what you work on today will take about 6 months to become apparent on if it has worked or failed. just remember content is king!oh and i try not to make signs in the evening but i can read from my laptop whilst watching TV and eating my dinner etc. :lol1:
nigel did make a good point on how much it will cost. yeh a few grand budget should do it… and you can easily put that into yellow pages etc on a single year. the trouble is, i know folk that have spent allot of cash and still ended up with a badly coded/optomised site that actually looks pretty professional. but google doesn’t rank you on looks because the bots cant see the cosmetics as such!
oh and don’t go looking at ranking sites such as Alexia and the like… sites like that rank based on “their” toolbar users activity. e.g. if you have a site that’s not visited much by their users it will through up wildly inaccurate reports and i think their site “actually tells you this some place in their “small print”.
I’m going to disagree with you Rob. I have a computing degree and a pretty solid web development background.
We outsource our SEO marketing. Why? Return on investment.
My time is better spent making money. The return we get on our investment with our SEO marketing is ten fold.
You can do SEO yourself but if you rank number 1 today how much is that worth to your company versus ranking number 1 in 12 months?
Do I still keep up to date with all my seo knowledge? Yep.
If you want to do it yourself sign up for a membership here: seobook.com
Your going to have bad experiences all the time in business. We were using an Australian based company who did a good job at the start and now have tapered off. We now use an offshore SEO person who costs us a lot less then anyone I could hire here.
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I don’t think it’s worth paying. I slapped a load of keywords into our site and we are position 1 or 2 on google now for our area. Plus we use AdWords on a small budget which generates plenty of enquiries. We may not do Yellow pages/Yell after this year.
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im currently involved with re-writing our site but instead of getting involved with the PHP and so forth, decided to use a popular CMS system instead which has a lot of search engine optimization features within.
I think it is more to do with how you market yourself and take the person through the website, what customer you are trying to attract, what you put in front of them.
Self SEO has come along way and you only really need to focus on a few simple steps to make an impression on the popular search engines, but I would just do the web, you need to ‘shout about your website’
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I am not disagreeing with any of you, i agree most areas are best done by a professional, as i have said earlier i have 3 very knowledgeable web guys i use on an ongoing basis… each specialising in their own Field.
quote Robert Lambie:what you work on today will take about 6 months to become apparent on if it has worked or failed. just remember content is king!this is as important to your site as the SEO. SEO is textbook stuff, content is not, that’s why we have so much spam mail offering to get you to the top ranking on Google. if this was true, think about it, can we ALL be ranked top? of course not… "Your content", back links etc must all be relevant to your SEO and so on… understanding SEO will help you on an ongoing basis when inputting your content, this will have to be done by you one way or another and if its done via a web guy it is an ongoing cost you really dont need. web/tech guys can really only implement the design and structure, it is up to you to do the rest. i.e content
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quote Robert Lambie:I am not disagreeing with any of you, i agree most areas are best done by a professional, as i have said earlier i have 3 very knowledgeable web guys i use on an ongoing basis… each specialising in their own Field.quote Robert Lambie:what you work on today will take about 6 months to become apparent on if it has worked or failed. just remember content is king!
this is as important to your site as the SEO. SEO is textbook stuff, content is not, that’s why we have so much spam mail offering to get you to the top ranking on Google. if this was true, think about it, can we ALL be ranked top? of course not… “Your content“, back links etc must all be relevant to your SEO and so on… understanding SEO will help you on an ongoing basis when inputting your content, this will have to be done by you one way or another and if its done via a web guy it is an ongoing cost you really dont need. web/tech guys can really only implement the design and structure, it is up to you to do the rest. i.e content
That I will agree with. Along with testing your SEO efforts to see whats working and what isn’t also helps with your product offerings and so forth.
🙂
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Every one is different and not all all methods suit everyone but for me I stick to what I know and pay folk to do what I cant. However I do think its important to at least understand stuff like SEO so you can instruct web guys etc to do what is needed
I know from experience a large amount of web designers do not understand it or at least don’t do anything about it when they build/design a site because thats all they do or thats all they think you are paying them for.
I know nothing about seo really and what I do know seems to be out of date as criteria changes.
Obviously Rob you know a lot about this and it must help you no even if its just to instruct others what you want doing and understand what they are talking about. Maybe you could post something that might help out -I know I would love to know more about relevant content and keywords and how long it takes for them to kick in.
Nigel
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at the end of the day, you are competing with others, the ones that win are the best at what they do, I do notice though that Rob’s company has very little presence on the web, not that its a sign of how good or bad it is,
just that you don’t always need a web site to be successful 😀the uksb boards (like most forums) are not quite the same as selling your products, and will always attract more hits than a commercial site
Peter
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Quite a good likeness I think!
SEO is only the tip of the iceberg for maintaining a site within the google community. As much as Mr gates would like it different, nobody will ever replace Google as the choice for search engine usage. To maintain a valid position is a full time job for an individual, maintaining links, content, keywords and checking out the competition to see what steps they are taking to be in the top three. I am involved with a clothing company in the South West and their web guy (in House) spends about 25% maintaining their e commerce site content and the rest optimising the site in google. They don’t use ad words, just their knowledge of Google.
It is astonishing what you need to do to be properly ranked.
Peter
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Peter, we do not have a website mate, the one you maybe referring too is there purely for SEO purposes only and geared around our trade/location etc and is already ranked high. however, there is "no content" as such… just frame work for the moment, cosmetics arent even as they will be. when and if i ever get the chance to get the content completed it will already be rated to a good degree for launch. there is a bit of politcs etc behind this and a bit more to it all but not something i wish/can to talk about here, sorry… 😕 :lol1:
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