Yahoo might be considered by some to be an also-ran, a relic from the younger days of the internet. If that is your thinking, you may want to reconsider. This also-ran gets between 164 and 172 million unique visitors a month on their Yahoo Local service according to compete.com and SEMrush. If that kind of traffic sounds pretty good to you, and if it sounds like it’s probably more traffic than your own site is getting, then you may want to consider adding Yahoo Local to your marketing strategy.
What Is It?
There are plenty of other services like Yahoo Local on the net. Yelp has one. Google has one tied to their almost universally used Google Maps application. Basically. it is a free service offering a platform for businesses to post details about themselves, their location, and what they do. It’s also a platform that those aforementioned 164-172 million unique monthly visitors can come to either sing the praises of a particular company, or vilify them.
As important as global reach is, at the end of the day, we humans are social creatures. We like interacting with our local communities, and that includes the businesses in them. If you haven’t yet availed yourself of local marketing services, then you should regard your marketing strategy as being incomplete. It’s just that simple.
How To Use It
It’s pretty simple to get started. You can sign up for a free account here and list the details of your business. Note that you can pay $9.95 a month and get their enhanced service offering, but this is by no means essential.
Once your page and company profile are established, the first thing you want to do is to link your new Yahoo Local page to your business website, using some SEO-rich keywords that describe what you do. Yahoo Local has already been indexed by Google, and Google’s bots and spiders regularly crawl the page for new entries, which means that you should see an almost immediate boost to the rankings of your site, in addition to the traffic you may get from Yahoo Local itself.
Once this basic work is completed, there are a couple of interesting things you can do here. You can, for example, sign up for all the other local marketing type services, create profiles there, and begin cross-linking them, in addition to linking them back to your company site. Or, having established a bit of web real estate on these services, you can begin marketing those pages, in addition to marketing your main website. The reason for doing this is to drive traffic to those pages and encourage customer reviews. Some percentage of those visitors will no doubt continue on to your site, and you win two ways, in addition to setting up a virtuous cycle, as more customer reviews on your Yahoo Local page means that it is more active, which will make it more visible, which will drive yet more traffic back to your company website.
Simple, but effective and low in cost – you need to add it to your mix.
