YP, formerly known as the Yellow Pages, now offers website rentals for small businesses. YP creates a small, five page website for your company and charges close to $100 a month.
For companies that don’t have a website, this may seem like a steal. After all, you get an attractive, mobile ready website almost instantly, and that website can conceivably help you improve your lead generation.
But the YP website rental model is a weak one, and one that will cause you many issues down the road. While YP does offer a valuable service, there are problems with this type of website, including:
- Copied/Repeating Content – This is the biggest issue. Every single YP website repeats the same content for the industry. If you cut and paste a sentence of a YP Powered website into Google, you get over 700 identical websites or more. That’s insanity. Websites with identical content are punished by Google and – while not completely removed from search engines – extremely unlikely to show up in local searches.
- Small/Little Content – Even if we assume that you can show up in a search, which we know you cannot, there is so little content that the website is unlikely to rank anyway, because Google needs content to understand what your website is about. Some pages are fewer than 100 words, and none of them are keyword optimized. More pages allows you to rank for more keywords, and tells Google what your website is about so that it can rank you better as well.
- No Useful Content/Added Content/Expertise – If every company has the same content, nothing makes you different. You won’t show up for any other searches, you won’t show up for any other keywords, and any customer that finds your website won’t see anything that makes them want to hire you.
YP charges $89 a month at minimum for this type of content. Compare that to use here at Great Leap Studios – We offer 25 pages of unique content written specifically for your website rental, keyword optimized, and high quality, all for only a little bit more than $89 a month. Your choice is between a website that can rank well in search engines for multiple keywords with information that helps establish expertise and unique content that is only available on your site, or 5 pages of weak copied content that can’t rank well and doesn’t sell anyone on your business.
YP.com’s idea of offering website rentals is a good one. But unique content really matters, and more content matters even more. Our websites are also mobile optimized, better, and far more competitive. Contact us today to find out more.
