One of the keys in a successful marketing campaign is establishing a strong public presence. This is what traditional marketing methods like yellow page marketing promises, and this is arguably what SEO outsourcing firms promise–not a sharp conversion of traffic to sales, but an improved presence on the Internet. There are a couple of different advantages for each strategy.
Advantages for SEO
Hiring outsourcing companies to handle an online marketing campaign can give a business more visibility, particularly in contrast to yellow page ads. Search engine marketing strategies can be customized if the initial methods aren’t working, allowing teams to continue to experiment until a method that works can be found.
This strategy can potentially reach a wider audience through sheer convenience. The yellow pages are massive books with a lot of pages, and prolonged reading or browsing is known to cause confusion in some people. In contrast, the Internet is significantly more subdued and, given a decent design, easier to read. The ease by which things can be found through search engines also adds another advantage SEO outsourcing has over yellow page ads.
Advantages for yellow pages
There are, however, some areas where traditional yellow page ads outperform even the best outsourcing companies and their SEO efforts. The first is the simple notion that if a person is looking for something there, he is already firmly in the market for it. The problem with SEO outsourcing is that people might just find the optimized site completely by accident. In contrast, someone who is opening up a very thick book like the yellow pages has what he is looking for in mind, and only needs to be convinced that one company or another can give him what he needs.
The second advantage is that SEO outsourcing can be confusing for those who are new to it and expensive for some others. For a company that has no idea how to go about it, the learning process can be particularly painful and can feel like an incredible waste of resources. For those that know enough to understand they cannot handle it in-house, the cost of contracting an outsourcing firm to do it for them might be more expensive than the cost of regularly having an ad in the yellow pages.
Simply a better choice
Ultimately, most businesses can get good results from SEO outsourcing. While ads in the yellow pages tend to have an easier time being converted to sales, that rarely makes up for the fact that the Internet is simply much more convenient for people to use when looking for something. Search engine marketing strategies are rapidly becoming the better choice for most industries, leaving older methods like yellow page marketing behind.