Directories: still relevant to a newspapers business
We have countless ad-ition blog posts that reiterate the fact that newspapers need to start to think about innovative directory businesses online and we’ve preached this for a couple of reasons:
- Newspapers need to diversify their revenue streams
- Suburban newspapers, especially, have the local retailer market covered and need to take advantage of that position
- Directories fit nicely with another “must implement” product, which is online couponing.
Moreover, and if for any reason you didn’t believe our previous blog posts, we present to you data from a company called Webvisible.
Webvisible is a small business-consulting firm that focuses on online solutions for brick and mortar retailers. Nonetheless, they, in tandem with Nielsen, have conducted a survey of random Internet users to find out how they searched for local businesses, from whom they’ve bought services or products from in the past. The results found that newspapers fell within the top 3 on the list of search resources, but they were the last of that 3 and almost 30 points behind search engines. The other part of this puzzle was that an assessment of small businesses showed that only 44 per cent of them have a Web site, and I doubt SEO was top of mind for many of these retailers when they built their sites, leaving them nowhere to be found online – at least not easily.
The above further ferments the conduit role newspapers can play between their local retailers and the community, through building easy to navigate directory sites with well thought out SEO strategies.
With only 44 per cent of local businesses having a Web presence and an average of 74% of the Canadian and US population online, newspapers can fill a definite service void and diversify their revenue sources while doing so.
