It used to be that small businesses looked to the Yellow Pages as a key source for leads. It is no longer and a sales executive here recently relayed this real life anecdote that captures the essence of why this is true:

There was a bag in the front yard. It had been sitting there for several days.

A little girl meets her father in the garage after work one day and says, “Daddy, what’s in that bag in the front yard.”

“I don’t know, honey, let take a walk over and see,” the father replies.

They walk over to the bag and discover the contents contain a Yellow Pages book.

“What’s the Yellow Pages, Dad?” asks the little girl.

“Well, when you need something, like a plumber, you look in the Yellow Pages directory to find one.”

They carry the bag into the garage and the father promptly drops the bag in the trash bin. The girl is dismayed as to why her father would toss such a useful directory into the garbage and inquired why.

“Well, when we need something now, we just turn look it up in Google,” explains the father.

Ironically, I looked around the office for a copy of a Yellow Book just prior to publishing this post – I was hoping to take a photo to add as a visual element to the blog. I couldn’t find a copy, so this Google screen shot will have to suffice.

Filed under: SEO, Small Business by Frank Strong