Yell.com Adwords Service Is a Waste of Time

I received a call from a lovely lady today who tried unsuccessfully to sell me a yell.com listing for one of the e-businesses I work on. She failed because Yell.com fails to realise that many businesses don’;t operate a bricks and mortar business, instead relying heavily on Google listings and Adwords for their custom -; a function that Yell.com’s regional directory based structure completely misses.

After a brief conversation where I vetted the ‘Google Friendly’; links that are nofollowed (yeah Google friendly… riiiight) I was passed onto a guy who wanted to sell me the Yell.com Adwords advertising service.

Here’s a quick lowdown on this service:

• You get to bid on a term in your area i.e. "beds in Honley"
• You get to specify your daily budget (wow really)
• You get a ‘landing page’ created as the target for your Adwords advert that can contain up to a massive seven bullet points, one of which can be your website address (no link) and telephone number

Anyone spot the numerous fatal flaws in this ill conceived service?

• The hits would be infinitesimally small
• No direct link to the relevant product page
• No tie with an ecommerce function
• The landing page would be completely unbranded or based on Yell’s previous efforts, completely amateurish

My advice is stay clear of this service and spend some money on a good Adwords training book or hire a team to do your PPC for you.

At least you’ll know you’re getting a better service than Yell.com

So What Should Yell.com Do?

Heres a couple of my quick thoughts to help kick start this ageing service:

• Firstly, remove the no follow from external links on their site
• Secondly re-work the site structure to make it more spider friendly
• Thirdly, recognise that lots of businesses dont have a showroom and re-work the logic of the site to operate around business type and not location
• Sack all of their customer web design team and invest in some up to date templates that can be easily themed (or just use wordpressmu)
• Completely re-think their Adwords offering and maybe tie it to some kelkoo.com style product portal so at least customers can sell items via their services (potential additional revenue stream too!)