The writings were on the wall for some time, with the (still limited) launch of Google Local Business Center Ads, Google is squeezing local directories, and yellow pages publishers out of valuable real-estate and clearly going after their business.
This is not for the lack of warning signs, Google hardly went through the back door, traditional directory and yellow pages publishers have known for some time that major online ad inventory carriers, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook have the upper hand over them. Given the fragmented U.S. market, most yellow pages, directories, and local search properties cannot muster enough audience to build a compelling advertising alternative, even on a local media level.
Maybe for a lack of better idea, a prevailing strategy among directories has been to develop revenues on borrowed time monetizing PPC market inefficiencies while building mostly easy-to-replicate reporting features that are hard to differentiate from a merchant perspective. The bad news is that managing PPC campaigns on major search engines for advertisers has already become an increasingly commoditized service, and competition is only getting heftier among traditional yellow pages and internet-based local search players.
Advertising markets inefficiencies tend to self-correct over time, merchants grow in sophistication, learn to replicate successful endeavors, and move away from local directory providers to become direct customers of the most popular search and social sites. Time and money spent educating local merchants about search marketing turns out to be self-defeating, as it eventually benefits competitive Internet media giants.
We are coming to the tipping point, what are the viable strategies for local directories now?
At SEO Samba, we are proposing to local directories to monetize the only part that search engines can not monetize; the organic results. We think it makes a whole lot of sense, and we welcome all directory marketers to join us and fight back.
Any other long-term viable strategy out there folks would like to share?
Tags: directory marketing
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