Seth Godin, best selling author of numerous business books including Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable and Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us is one of the leading business thinkers of the 21st Century. He’s been talking about the radically changed circumstances that newspapers and yellow page companies face because of Google’s dominance

Regarding the Yellow Pages industry, he said that, in the past, it was a perfect industry (like the music industry). Small businesses want to pay for media that works with an easy-to-prove ROI (i.e. phone calls) and directory publishers were the top dogs in that space. But things changed with the arrival of Google. He simply told me “Google is the Yellow Pages now” because of completeness of data and a ROI-driven business model. He then wondered out loud if Google would be a monopoly in local search, i.e. that they would be so powerful that consumers would want only one player. His answer was no. There’s certainly some place for another major player in the space.

Yellow Pages

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Local SEO

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