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Comparing the Online Marketing Services of SilverServers and Yellow Pages


September 26th 2022


Comparing the Online Marketing Services of SilverServers and Yellow Pages

Once upon a time, in a world before the internet, when humankind shared their business services by word of mouth, a young man had a dream of changing the world. That man, Reuben H Donnelly, succeeded. In 1886, he created the first Yellow Pages directory - a glorious few yellow pages where any person could find local business listings with ease! His invention slowly caught hold of the imagination of directory publishers throughout the world.

For more than a century, golden yellow pages represented the pinnacle of business marketing for local businesses. With thousands upon thousands of copies distributed, business owners could hope that their listing would be seen by the masses and that they might find local clients to whom they could offer their services. It was a remarkable time. But it wouldn’t last forever.

Deep in the minds of brilliant mathematicians, an evil that would eventually darken the lustre of the yellow pages was born. Over time, computers began to be networked together, then, one fateful day, the internet was born. As the internet’s power grew, so did people’s dependence on it. The age of yellow paper was coming to an end. Search engines began to replace paper business directories, and the Yellow Pages were slowly left behind. However, they were determined to not be forgotten.

When the time was right, the Yellow Pages embraced the internet and used the memory of their former glory as a tool to help them compete with experienced online marketing companies. They made a name for themselves that still stands to this day. They have not been forgotten, although younger generations are often unaware of their existence.

Does the Yellow Pages name shine as brightly today as the famed yellow directories of old? Or should they be avoided?

Here we will compare the online marketing services of Yellow Pages with SilverServers - a marketing company and SEO specialist that has been providing website services since 1997. Throughout those years we’ve helped many clients manage or move away from their Yellow Pages marketing services.

Domain Name Management

With Yellow Pages, when you select a domain name, they maintain control of the domain name. In some cases we have heard that they behave as if they own it. If you're planning to stay with them, that’s not a problem. However, it may be challenging to leave their services if you ever want to take your domain name somewhere else. Some business owners have reported feeling like their domain name was being held hostage.

With SilverServers, we register your selected domain name in your name. We help manage it for you as needed, but you own it. It doesn’t even need to be registered with us for us to help you manage it! If you want to transfer your domain to a different provider, we might be sad (and you might be able to tell), but you’re free to take it.

Website Management

Similar to earlier, Yellow Pages seems to offer useful website management services if you plan to stay with them for a long period of time. But in most cases, Yellow Pages owns the website design template you select with them. Their contract makes it difficult to take it with you if you want to move to a different website host or management provider. We have had clients who came to us from Yellow Pages that were stuck for months trying to gain access to their content and end their contracts.

At SilverServers we also provide contracted services. However, if you want to leave we’re able to make adjustments as needed or provide reasonable options for ending a contract. And if you leave on good terms, you own your website’s HTML and design. We’ll put the HTML and design into a file and send it to you to take to your new website services provider.

SEO and Rankings

Company names used to be designed to show up first on the published page in a Yellow Pages category. That’s why some companies have a “AAA” in front of their name. Unfortunately, being the original platform for ranking your company doesn’t make Yellow Pages great at ranking your company in an online search engine.

Yellow Pages advertises that they provide SEO services. However, in all of our tests of the websites of Yellow Pages clients, we’ve never seen any evidence that SEO efforts occur. Additionally, without exception, every business we’ve moved from our SEO services to Yellow Pages has lost significant amounts of valuable search engine rankings. Yellow Pages seems to be great at ranking businesses for their business names only. We rarely see many other rankings for Yellow Pages websites.

SilverServers provides SEO from the ground up. We optimize our physical servers for loading websites fast. We build websites on an optimized platform and programming principles that give your website a good technical SEO base to start from. Our SEO programs regularly work on your website to optimize it for different search results that you want to rank for. We keep up-to-date with Google’s constantly changing rules so that your website has the best chance to rank.

Traffic Analytics

Yellow Pages provides their own proprietary website analytics software. They mention these analytics and traffic data in any sales conversations. Through the years, we have seen their traffic data not match up with Google Analytics data. Additionally, in the numbers we’ve compared to Google Analytics, Yellow Pages Analytics data typically seems to report significantly higher numbers than Google Analytics. In our experience, they have preferred to use their own website analytics data in all cases.

At SilverServers, we only use Google Analytics data for your website. This means, among other things, that we have no way to influence your search engine traffic data.

Cost for Online Marketing Services

We’ll compare the cost of SEO services here, though we have many competing services with Yellow Pages. The bang-for-buck differences are similar for all comparative services between Yellow Pages and SilverServers.

At Yellow Pages, the SEO Starter package starts at $300/month. This package provides keyword research for 2-3 keywords, which they will use on 3 pages on your website. No blog posts will be written. Some other minor services are offered, and additional features can be added for $500 and $750.

Their recommended $1000/month package helps with 7 pages and writes 4 blog posts per year.

At SilverServers, we recommend every client starts with our Grassroots Professional package, at $299/month. On this package, you will have options for how to use our services each month, with the focus on creating a solid base of content to rank you for important keywords. Once the important existing pages are optimized (typically the Home and Services pages),blog posts can be written monthly to support those pages. This package has proven to get results when SEO principles are followed and collaboration is maintained. Also, it seems to provide more value, but costs $700/month less than the recommended Yellow Pages package. Our goal is simply to help you grow your site rankings in a cost effective way.

Considering Yellow Pages online marketing services? Although they are a well-known name that was once a giant for advertising your business, we don’t believe their online marketing services are as valuable as they could be. Consider getting a second opinion about your website services by meeting with the team at SilverServers!


Find more marketing articles in the Marketing and SEO section of our blog!

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