SEO Article Series

The Future of Consumer Purchasing Research

Forward thinking companies are preparing for a decline in the importance of the Yellow Pages.

For decades consumers have turned to the yellow page directories as their first choice for researching household purchases. But now it seems that huge numbers of consumers are letting their 'fingers do the walking' on their computer keyboards instead of their phonebooks.

The latest 2004 statistics identify a "big gain" for E-Commerce saying that consumers are using the Internet for commerce more than ever before ( Canadian 2003 online consumer sales rose 51% to $5.5 billion, while B2B sales rose 35% to $13.1 billion [1]).

Another release at the end of 2003 found that consumers are increasingly using the Internet for researching their household purchase decisions, for everything from automobiles, to travel, to moving companies and personal services. An estimated 4.5 million households, according to StatsCan, "used the Internet to support purchasing decisions, either by window shopping or by placing online orders.[2]"

This trend signals the end of an era for the traditional yellow page directories. Static, paper-bound directories can't compete with the continuously updated real-time results being provided by search engines like Google. Many consumers are recognizing this and are voting with their purchasing dollars and now smart businesses are scrambling to stake their claim in the search engines because that's where the consumers are going.

These statistics are compelling, even for businesses that have websites but don't actually sell online - in addition to online spending, over 800,000 households made walk-in or telephone purchases from vendors they had found by researching online.[2]

Getting listed in the search engines has become as important to a business' success as being listed in the phone book - and may soon surpass it. Having a website won't help at all if it's listed as result number 300 in Google behind all of its competitors.

Today's businesses need to give serious thought to how they can really benefit by diversifying their marketing eggs into different baskets. The experience of Ahead of the Web's clients has shown that they can reduce their expenditure on yellow page directories and still increase their overall sales simply by focusing more on marketing their websites. We have clients that have gone from being virtually dependent on yellow book listings 6 years ago to the point where today 85% of their sales now come through their website.

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© 2004 Ahead of the Web Marketing Services - www.aheadoftheweb.com
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