We had a new phone book delivered to the house yesterday.  My 10-year-old son who loves books and has read over 1000 pages in a single weekend picked it up and gaped at it huge size. “What’s this? he asked with eyes big as saucers. I know he has seen them before.  I think so anyway. Pretty sure…

Then I started thinking about it, when is the last time I picked up a phone book with the intention of finding a phone number?  I honestly can’t remember but I’m sure it was years ago.  And then I got to thinking about how digital technology is killing many aspects of the print industry.  Newspaper, magazines, and phone books… the list goes on. Phone book companies for the most part have done a good job transitioning to the digital age.  I can’t wait until you only see phone books in museums and movies.

Having once managed the Internet department for Phone Directories Company, I know a little more about phone books than most people.  And it’s interesting to watch a company whose medium is passing try to figure out how to convert their old model to a new model. Some make it, some don’t.

And of course this just ties in with SEO.  It’s just not enough to call up your phone book company and buy a $3000 listing and expect to see some traffic to your business from it.  Now you have to optimize, localize, fine tune, design, redesign, maintain, and regularly update your digital presence.  And it’s funny, you find a company who used to spend anywhere from $5000-$15000 every year for their half page ad and they can’t justify spending the same for someone to manage their digital presence.  Then at the same time, they still pump that budget into the old dying medium knowing that it’s dying and not expecting but somehow hoping that they’ll continue to see an ROI like they would have 10 years ago.  It just doesn’t happen.

There are a few that get it.  They’re exploring new media and trying new things.  These will be the companies that grow and dominate the local markets over the next 10 years.  I went to a social networking event called a swarm last week organized by a little Hawaiian BBQ place that I never would have heard of.  If you’re on foursquare you probably know what a swarm is.  We tried for it but fell short of the required 50 attendees to get our badge. But it was a great experience for me as an internet professional.  It was an even better experience for Pounders Hawaiin Grill.  The place was packed.  I don’t think they could have handled the 50 people we were hoping for.

Now how much did they spend on this marketing? Nothing. Except for the time of one employee to get on Foursquare and do a little networking.  Now it might be a little more complicated than a traditional phone book ad. But not much.  And then let’s talk about the ROI.  How could the phone book ever compete?

The footer of your site is one of the most critical and overlooked parts of the site.  The article at WebDesignerDepot offers many good points from a design perspective but I prefer a good combination of SEO and user-centric features.  Examples like the White House and Apple are what most SEO firms will recommend.  They’ll tell you to make sure you have links there to all your important pages and make sure you load your keywords into them.  That’s all good for the search engines but don’t forget about the user.  Mail Chimp takes the space in the footer and uses it to repeat its sales pitch. Chances are, if someone has read all the way to the bottom of a page, they are predictably going to be more interested in what you are doing/selling on your website than people that never make it to the footer.  But Mail Chimp also loses some SEO value.  So which is the right strategy?

At this point I would say take a step back and look at your analytics.  What are your users doing with your current footer.  Maybe it’s time to try some A-B testing with your footer and see if adding the sales pitch without the links makes a difference in your conversion rate.  I’m betting it will.  But every website is different.  It could be that you lose a couple spots in your rankings and the difference in traffic isn’t worth the gain in conversion rate. But then again, maybe it will be.

There’s also pretty good odds that you are using social media in your marketing.  You are right? You should be.  Social media icons and links could fit very well into your footer strategy.  But again, consult your analytics and do some testing.

Above all, remember the first rule of SEO.  If it’s useful for real users, the search engines have figured it out or will figure it out. Eventually