Benefits of being on Yell.com

lewis_thm

My friend is spending a huge amount of money each year to be on Yell.co directory. They only get 600 referral visits a year but have been told it has a positive effect on Organic Search results such as Google.

How would you measure the affect this yearly fee is having? Would they lose search rankings if they downgraded or stopped the Yell account.

If anyone as had a similar issue let me know

Thanks

JasX

There will be some positive google effect on pagerank but

1- From yell.com alone it will be a small contribution.
2- There will be other no/low cost ways of achieving the same ends getting your companies detailes listed elsewhere online.
3-Many many other ways of marketing your business online -there was short interview in this morning's city AM newspaper with a guy covering online marketing -using social media, does your company have a facebook account? having a twitter feed thats worth following etc etc?

Overall with yell.com I suggest some hard 'by the numbers' analysis be done, what business is your friend in? what is the value in £ of each referral so is there a net positive return on money spent? if there are any other benefits can she put a £ value on them. how might the economice of situation change in future?

How crowded is her market with competitiors (ie do a few searches as tho you were someone looking for service X, are here target customers likely to look on yell.com early on? think if I found myself needing service X, where might I go to look, if I could use service X but it hadn't occured to me it existed what might prompt me to go make use of service X etc etc type stuff).

Can't be more specific on the details you've given so sorry for being so general....

JasX

EDIT: do a quick google search on "yell.com" and its effect "pagerank", you'll some interesting discussions and opinions around out there

InsideInsurance

SEO is a black art for those outside of Google/ Yahoo etc. Their algorithm is massively complex and outsiders trying to reverse engineer it without the luxury of a sterile environment are always going to be including an good slug of estimation.

In theory, assuming there isn't a NoFollow command then the inbound link should have some positive impact on the SEO of their site. That said, there is some theories that Google ignore's inbound links from paid for listings/ directories.

I wouldn't place the value of the link for SEO purposes at £X00s but they also need to factor in what those 600 direct referrals get them plus the other Z contacts they get because of the listing.

paula.paula13

you can read more about my problems with Yell.com here: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/43754862#Comment_43754862

Yell did not do the SEO that they were supposed to do as part of the top end package I paid for. After cancelling my contract I finally discovered why I never showed up in any web searches... yes, Yell had forgotten to link my site to Google so Google couldn't even see the site, let alone get it anywhere in the search results!

Their tagging was very poor. When I looked into it very little thought had been put into tags. The website they designed for me as part of the package was also very poor quality.

One of the claims Yell make is that they are one of only 2 platinum rated Google providers (I don't remember the exact term they used) and that this meant that only Yell could get my site onto page 1 of google. When I investigated this claim it turned out to be untrue anyway!

What I can tell you is that I spent 4 months with Yell and my website never appeared in any Google search result, for any of the searches that it should have. I regularly checked the first 20 pages for each search term.