Hey readers, Webvisible just raised a bunch of money and Spotrunner just bought Weblistic. I am curious if any of you out there have used any of the local search engine advertising solutions like ReachLocal, Webvisible, OrangeSoda, etc. and what your experiences have been. If you have some thoughts please email them to me at localseo at localseoguide.com. Thanks.
Also if any of you are at SESNY and want to connect please drop me a line.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Stephen Espinosa // Mar 18, 2008 at 6:20 am
Hey Andrew,
Let’s meet up again, I am speaking today at the Local Search Marketing Tactics Session.
2 David - Los Angeles Internet Marketing // Mar 19, 2008 at 9:31 am
I used yodle.com for a client - an accountant. I promised them that if it worked out, I’d send them more business. I had built my own marketing campaign to compare, and there were a couple of differences.
1) They didn’t do any geo targeting - just stuck to geotargeted words
2) They had it on 24/7 - while I had mine set for business hours.
3) They missed an entire segment of keywords (cpa etc.) which is more profitable.
At the end of the day though, they also were spread out across all of the engines, I had only started with Google, and their cost per action was a couple dollars less than mine.
However, my client wasn’t happy with the amount of cancellations that happened via the yodle website. Most of them canceled before coming in. The yodle rep just told me that “for some reason accountants get the lowest conversion rates”…
Bottom line is though, there’s alot of garbage going on in local search. Alot of people that aren’t willing to plop down $1,000 / month on me, have been sold on the “we’ll get you number one on the big keywords and give you a free website for $100 / month”.
Yodle is a great company, and although it didn’t work out for my client, I’m sure they’ll do great things. I’m really interested to know how Reachlocal is doing though. They were another company I wanted to outsource my local search to,so I could bring down the minimum monthly payment I would charge clients.
3 Eitan // Mar 23, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I am using “Walla Advantage”, which is the advertising solution suggested by “Walla” - the biggest portal and local search engine in Israel. As a professional search engine marketing specialist I must say that it has not shown me any proved results. The whole business model is based upon “bids” while number of clicks are not taken into account. I personally find it hard when search engines does not take into account the quality factor while considering add placement.
4 David - Los Angeles Internet Marketing // Mar 27, 2008 at 12:31 am
Bad news, talked to a lead who had used reachlocal - and wasn’t very happy with them. She’d dumped them 6 months ago.
She is a lawyer - running solo, and she had been getting phone calls for things that she doesn’t do. This quite sad, as from what I see, the concept of Yodle and Reachlocal, and they are really good. However, because they undersell their products, they can’t give individual attention (or they are hiring incompetents).
I noticed with Yodle as well, that they missed a whole category of keywords for accounting - CPA keywords. That is simply unacceptable. I shouldn’t be having to fix that for them.
These things shouldn’t happen in companies focused on Paid and Natural search. Not if they are assisting (supposedly) thousands of clients.
I really wish I could outsource smaller clients to them, and allow people who can’t afford $3,000+ a month to advertise online.
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