(NOTE- I am a customer of SEO. All comments are unsolicited and unpaid, but you probably won’t believe that, since you’re probably too cynical. That’s too bad for you. You need to enlarge your circle of trust. )

I have recently been amazed by my innocuous Google searches for other types of businesses for their address, like auto repair, coffee shop, restaurants, hotels, and received a bunch of highly ranked items from Yelp. My feeling is that the actual business website along with the address should be first in organic search.

If Yelp has this much power, what about Citysearch? Google Maps? Videos in the future, like Youtube? There will only be more competition in my opinion, not less. And who has time to deal with all of their rules? And why do these for-profit companies get to make the rules, and thus be able to make or break you? There must be a way to have your own business website be at the top, just because from a common-sense perspective it makes the most sense.

Of course, I have the utmost faith that long-term, the algorithms at Google will always put the small business owner on top of organic search. That way, you will never have to tweak your website, pay for Ad Words or other types of search advertising, and never need a SEO company again.

Well, maybe…..

Roy

http://www.vernonhillsplasticsurgery.com/robots.txt

I’ve been tempted from time to time to revisit my post giving kudos to Court Cunningham particularly in light of his quote about SEO best-practices here: http://www.crn.com/it-channel/204203322

Perhaps you are implementing some technologies which would enable quality measurement. And for that I applaud the effort.

But in my opinion there are still many customers where your company’s ignorance of SEO best practices is assuring that they can’t quit you for fear of losing all their traffic — especially as in the case above where your conversion tuned site outranks the client’s main property due in part to the lack of a robots.txt (not exactly SEO best practices).

This is a perfect example of the dangers of the Yodle / Natpal doppleganger site issue. If this customer ever leaves Yodle they’re in a worse position than when they were first sold due to your doppleganger outranking them and being perceived as the authoritative site.

To quote from an email I received anonymously from one of your co-workers:

“I personally was rather amazed that this very basic thing was left out, … I have been pushing to make disallows standard, and we are now planning to add them. Your article helped move my issue up the priority food chain.”

And then, from Court Cunningham himself in his response to my original post about Yodle where he says:

“Our policy has recently changed to require the use of robots.txt tag on all new duplicate sites, and we are in the process of implementing this across our hundreds of customers.”

That was over a year ago and here we still find sites which are, in my opinion, doing a disservice to the customer who’s paying you.

And then there’s the conversation I had with one of Yodle’s former customers who told me about his account manager bidding on irrelevant, low value and out of area terms just to spend his budget. This guy even quoted his account rep as saying something to the effect of “you can’t make money with cautious money” — I mean, come on! Was she channeling Vin Diesel in Boiler Room or what?

Again I appreciate your enthusiasm and I’m not vain enough to suggest that we have 100% customer satisfaction on every day. And we certainly make mistakes from time to time too.

In the best case you’ll take advantage of this to help your company do better.

Thanks again for your input,
Will

Thank you for your professional reply. I would be very interested in hearing you expand on your point that the “value proposition isn’t universally perceived”

Thanks,

Brian

First, thank you for taking the time to comment. I want you to know that I really appreciate your enthusiasm for your company.

I have had direct conversations with both Yodle customers and sales reps and all I can say is that the value proposition isn’t universally perceived.

Again, thanks very much for your time in stopping by.

All the best,
Will

I’d like to take issue you lumping Yodle in with these other names. I’ve worked for the largest names in online advertising (Yellowpages.com, Citysearch.com & acquisitions like insiderspages.com, merchantcircle, etc. Prior to this I owned an SEO and web development company.

The point of listing my resume of sorts is to say, while I agree with you on many points, Yodle does not belong in the same conversation. Having seen the inner workings and value proposition of the internet’s major local search players, I have the experience to say, Yodle is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

While Yodle does have like competitors (reach local). There is no apples to apples comparison. Yodle does exactly as the “slick sales pitch” says. Yodle gives local businesses a simple, transparent and cost effective way of gaining local customers online.

Yodle is the first company I’ve worked with that strives to exceed client expectations by using call rating and dedicated account managers to lower the cost per call and cost per customer month over month. This is a huge separation from major lead generation companies like Service magic whose goal is to maintain and increase the cost per call to their clients.

Yodle gives local businesses the freedom to run their business and not have to worry about keeping up with changing technology. Yodle keeps it simple. Use Yodle and get calls. Rate the calls and improve the quality of the calls month over month. No long term contracts. Start and pause the campaign with seasonal or work load changes.

Lastly, what I love most about Yodle is the reverse transparency. Many local businesses get in the way of their own success. The number one cause of lost business is poor call processing. However, what I’ve found is that with out proof, most business owners will deny this till the cows come home. To their defense…many just didn’t realize their own negative impact on their sales process.

Yodle changes the playing field. Want proof? Simply listen to the calls. If a customer calls and the business answers the phone with “yeah?” or “Bill here” or better yet, sending the call to voice mail because they don’t have a live answering service, it’s no wonder a customer loses confidence and goes elsewhere.

So Yodle does so much more than offer online advertising and certainly should be excluded from this article.

If you question this response, feel free to contact me.

Best to you,

Brian Johnson