The earliest record of telephones in the Northwestern Bell service area was a two-telephone intercom circuit used by a Little Falls, Minnesota, druggist and his clerk in 1876. It has never been definitively established where Northwestern Bell's earliest roots lie. History Early beginnings 1897 map of service area Our company, Dex Media, publishes Yellow Pages print directories in these states:Īrizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Washington, DC.Northwestern Bell Telephone Company served the states of the upper Midwest opposite the Southwestern Bell area, including Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska. The key takeaway for your business is all about being findable wherever your customers are searching: (This is also called “ Barnacle SEO“, a term coined by Will Scott, CEO of Search Influence.) And if your business has a rich, up-to-date listing with them, you can ride their coattails and get visibility you might not have been able to achieve with your own website. In order to rank for the broader, more competitive keywords like “plumber, Dallas” make sure your business has a robust business profile listing on the major online directories because they typically show up well in organic results for the bigger keywords.
It’s a specific term coupled with a more specific geo area. For example, “emergency plumbing services, Coppell, TX”. Optimize your website and target long-tail search terms that fit your category of business and your geo location.There are two ways a small business can stay in the game and compete for visibility in organic results to get new local customers. If you want to be found by 95% of people who are searching on Google, it’s a top 10 game all the way.
When a small business sees that nearly half of consumers look for a business in the organic online search results (primarily Google), the challenge becomes “How do we show up in the top 10 in Google?” Because if your business ends up on page 2 in Google results, only 4% of users ever search that far. 11% of consumers use all other online search mediums combined (including online directories like and ).12% of consumers prefer checking the paid online search sources.29% of consumers are looking in the printed phone directory.48% of consumers prefer to look at the organic online search results.Here’s the breakdown from Philadelphia, PA, in February, 2015, as an example: What about digital consumers? When they search online, whether mobile or desktop, where do they go to find a local business? We are digital consumers, clearly, and it’s totally understandable that print phone book usage has been declining, just not at the rate or in the volume people might think. So, some people do still use print yellow pages, but what does this mean? If your most profitable clients are over 50 ( and they do have 70% of the disposable income) and you have an all-digital strategy, you might be missing out on a valuable lead generation channel in print yellow pages. As business people involved in marketing, we (and the people we work with) tend to be the quickest to become aware of and adopt new trends, forgetting that not everyone moves as quickly as we do. As a group, they have been much slower in adopting new technologies. Researchers have found that habits die hard in many people over 50. And in the metro areas, a solid 40% of people are still using phone books. These are consumers who have said that in the past year they have used a phone book to find a business. Outside of the metro areas across America, print phone book usage is just shy of 70%. That’s why sophisticated marketers look at media in terms of a mix to be adjusted to hit different audiences at different price points and get new local customers.įor instance, take a look this chart from Market Authority: Chart courtesy of Market Authority, Inc. Research firm Market Authority has interviewed consumers for the past 5 years about their local shopping habits, 350,000 interviews in both rural and urban communities.Īnd–spoiler alert–consumers look at a wide variety of media for local business search, including print directories.
Everyone does their searching for local businesses on their mobile phones.Įveryone takes the phone book straight out to the recycling bin.
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