RateItAll: The Opinion Network

best source of business for me, i rely on yell.com advertising, im in the removals business and spent about 2000 on yell.com and get an average of 20 calls a month of which i convert 15 in to business with an average of 80 per job you can work the maths.

Fantastic, looking to epxand in more classifications in the next month or so....

No one ever seems to mention this, but here's how Yell.com works: You pay for the 'special' listings with the yellow background. If there are more than ten, then you get randomly rotated between the next page and the front page. In any case, adverts are randomly rotated on a page. To test this for yourself, find a popular listing such as 'flowers' and then refresh the page; see how the listings change? You choose a category. If someone searches for 'web design' and you are in the 'internet web design' category a results page is automatically displayed. However, if your company performs 'search engine optimisation' it has to pick a category to be included in - as like as not, 'internet web design' again. A searcher typing in the term 'search engine optimisation' will then get a list of all available meta categories - vehicle engines, internet, etc. Click the category that's appropriate. Within THAT category your site will be listed in further random categories. Essentially it's a mess - your keywords that you have in your ad. don't guarantee you a top spot - look at this link and notice that the top item don't have 'search engine' anywhere in the text. (Unless this link somehow still randomly rotates the ads.) [url]http://www.yell.com/ucs/UcsSearchAction.do?startAt=0&keywords=search+engine&location=Sheffield&scrambleSeed=8300&clarifyIndex=1&searchType=classic&ooascrambleSeed=8300[/url] Since there is a limited text space in the advert to include all the things your company does, you might want to take out an advert in a couple of categories (at 300+ a go) to cover all bases. But even then there's no guarantee that your having your keywords in the text will get you to the top. What are you meant to do? By creating categories Yell.com hopes to force you to describe yourself in a limited way. 'I'm a web designer' - so I'll take an advert the 'Web design' category. 'I also do E-commerce' - so I'll take an advert in the E-commerce category. That way I can guarantee that I show up for those two terms. Oh, and 'I do Search Engine Optimisation ' - well, that's just pot luck, I don't know what to do. Now, how much text can Yell.com show? Very little. Unlike Yellow pages, where users can see perhaps 30-50 adverts at one go and scan through them all then flick through to another page, on the internet users aren't going to wait for images to load or spend too much time scrolling down pages or clicking to the next page. So Yell.com has limited the amount of text that can be shown in order to cram more adverts in. More money for them - not so good for the advertiser, who is just another bland line of text in a sea of bland lines of text. Finally, Yell.com will send you 'interesting' figures on how popular they are. Along the lines of, ''1000 people searched for Search Engine Optimisation in Sheffield using Yell.com'. You need to ask yourself several things - Just for comparison, how many people searched in the major search engines for those same keyphrases? What chance has my advert got of getting to the top of the Yell.com results if there is no category called 'Search Engine Optimisation'? If it's in the highlighted listings, then it's going to get rotated to the very top of those listings on a random basis - so do you really want to be at the top only one in ten times? If twenty people have highlighted listings, do you really want to be on the NEXT page fifty percent of the time? Will the few lines of text you're allowed differentiate you from your competitors? How many categories am I going to have to pay to be in so that when a searcher types in a broad category name ('Web design') I'm on the page that immediately appears? How much more flexible are MSN, Google and Yahoo! when it comes to being top for their Pay Per Click ads, how many keywords and keyphrases can I appear for IMMEDIATELY using these search engines (an infinited number), and how much cheaper will it be using the search engine PPC ads.?