Urban Voyage's 3D Blog

We had a senior Yellow Group representative in the office today and he had some interesting things to say about the online directories and their relationship with Google. This is our account of what was said and we’ve written a blog about it because it just didn’t add up.

Firstly he claimed that because they are such a large company that Google pays them to purchase their directory data. I’d be very surprised that with all the technology Google has that they would pay for data that they get for free by their normal indexing of websites. Perhaps I’m wrong, if you have any information to the contrary please let me know.

Next he said they are Google’s largest customer in New Zealand. If this is correct, what are they paying Google for? The Yellow Group owns Whitepages.co.nz, Groupy.co.nz, YellowLocal.co.nz , Finda.co.nz and other well known directory sites in New Zealand. In some ways this could be considered an alternative way to find companies within NZ or could be considered unnecessary given Google is very very good at providing answers to your questions and providing relevant links to the exact company and service you are looking for.

So what does the Yellow Group pay Google for? I suspect it’s Google Adwords that they pay for to increase clicks and traffic through to their directories.  As a person looking to find something specific on the Internet does it help me to click on a link that then sends me to another page with multiple companies listed? Wouldn’t you rather click directly through the website or service you are looking for? It seems counter productive to be buying traffic to their directories when Google is already the best in the World at providing results. By doing this Yellow Pages are effectively saying they are better at providing results than Google – quite a surprising statement.

If this is not helpful for customers, then question becomes who is it helping? Well, how to Yellow Pages make their Money? Through advertising! Through increased traffic Yellow Advertising Reps can sell companies on the volume and amount of traffic their online directories get and in specific categories they they are basically baiting traffic to. Imagine for a moment that you are a company wanting to increase exposure to your website, company and increase sales… You may think that the traffic stats are impressive, however show you nothing as to the quality of person viewing your listing, nor tracking conversions that lead to actual sales. All of which is possible if you manage your own Google Adwords campaign yourself.

For companies that already pay for advertising through Google Adwords, they now have another competitor in the form of the Yellow Pages effectively bidding up prices and providing customers with less specific answers to their search queries. Adwords results are already less trusted than the Natural Search results that Google provides as companies pay for the ad and the positioning is generally defined by the quality match between the ad and the search query and how much a company pays to be in which position (#1 will typically pay more for the privilege).

In my opinion, they should focus on adding value to customers than trying to recreate what’s not broken – Google’s natural search results. If you already use Google Adwords to promote your business, run a quick search on your most used terms and see if any Yellow online ads show up and if they do – I’d suggest you could boycott paying for any online listings on their websites because they are now competing with you by promoting every other company in their directory. Oh, unless of course you want to pay Yellow more to upgrade your listing on their website.

Apparently there’s also a big redesign coming out for the yellow.co.nz website, which has improvements to the user interface and usability. So that will be great to see. As mentioned this is just our thoughts and I’d appreciate feedback from other companies that have had results (good or otherwise) from advertising with these guys.

Search engine optimization (SEO) would be best handled by a specialist company and there’s plenty of providers that can expertly manage Adwords campaigns for your business (that won’t compete against you)!