RE: FN-FORUM: Yell.com : any good for freelancers?

date posted 22nd November 2007 12:22

I tried Yell for a while, but soon dropped it. I'm based in essex. My
research suggested that most potential customers type in 'essex' as opposed
to the smaller, more specific town I'm in. The problem was that they're over
100 enhanced listings, giving about a 10% chance of actually being on the
1st page for any search. It just didn't bring in the returns for me, purely
down to the 'competitive' location where I'm based.

However, I've noticed they've introduced the 'find closest' feature which
allows users to put in their post code and it shows the closest businesses
on a map. That's really cool for the users, and opens more opportunities to
be found by your nearest customers.

I still feel you can't beat good old fashioned SEO (optimizing for local
places in your keywords). Also, a well targeted adwords campaign, can bring
decent results.

Jomo
www.DynamicDeveloper.co.uk

-----Original Message-----

Thanks for the tip. In know Yell can yield great
results in some industry sectors so I'm trying
hard not to prejudge it. It's a lot of cash to
throw away though if nothing comes of it.

Having exchanged a few emails with Yell over the
last 24 hours, I'm actually surprised at how
little data they have available to help customers
optimise their campaigns.

There don't appear to be many enhanced listings
to compete with in my area and the small amount
of data I have been given suggests it could
perform well - but then it would wouldn't it.

Plus id Yell are targeting my competitors at the
moment too (which they most likely are) this
could quickly become diluted as the same traffic
would simply be split between a greater number of
advertisers.

I guess one option is to give it a few months and see if anyone else bites?

ColinR
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