While many marketers have written off Internet Yellow Pages as dead, the recent Google Pigeon update may have made them relevant once more.

The recent Google Pigeon update appears to have provided a bit of a traffic upswing for Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and other online business directories, at the cost of individual local businesses’ site rankings in many cases.

In order to cash in on this new paradigm, businesses must once again return to the yellow pages as a source of customer referrals. Here’s how to optimize your presence in IYPs and other directories.

Now, if you’ve been watching the course of local online business trends over the past decade and noted how the internet has impacted both traditional media and their online equivalents, you may be thinking I’ve completely lost the plot by recommending to shift back to Internet Yellow Pages promotional efforts (since many businesses have moved their advertising budgets away from yellow pages).

Search engines and the internet have put some serious dents in old local media powerhouses like yellow pages, newspapers, classifieds, etc. I’ve frequently mentioned in the past how Google and other local search engines were edging out IYPs as the local business information provider-of-choice for consumers. However, the pendulum may be swinging back somewhat now.

As a number of us noted, the recent Pigeon update improved the ranking and visibility of IYPs and directories, and SEMrush and other competitive analytics services are already showing a real upswing in those sites’ visits as a result.