Have you ever felt let down by the service Yell.com provides?

Perhaps you feel like you have poor rankings, or you aren’t getting enough business? Well, you are not alone. As passionate web designers, Visualise have compiled the following five reasons why Yell.com may not be the company you hoped they’d be…

1) Always Templates, NEVER Bespoke

Yell.com are addicted to templates. You would think as so-called “designers”, Yell would deliver innovative, original websites to elevate your business above your competition. You would think wrong. In 2012, a study of 1000 Yell.com websites found that 65% of their designs used the same template. Not only that, 20% used a second template, 10% a third and 5% a mixture of all three! This is lazy work by a team ‘battery’ designers, desperate to mass produce websites as quick as possible.

2) Poor Coding + Poor Content = Poor SEO

When you consider the second-rate design work from Yell.com, their shoddy coding should come as no surprise. Basic and lazy, most of it is copied verbatim from other Yell framework. What’s more, most pages within these websites feature fewer than 100 words per page; with the industry standard being at least 500 words for well-ranking pages, this is incredibly sub-par.

To make matters worse, Yell.com have a reputation for rewording the content from similar industry’s websites. They also copy competitor keywords AND key phrases, which can severely damage your rankings. No wonder they strong-arm customers into using Yell AdWords for an extortionate cost!

3) Say Goodbye to Google Rankings & Analytics

Yell is struggling to survive in a world that is increasingly dominated by Google. After all, when was the last time you used Yell.com to search for a business online? As a result, Yell websites consistently struggle to rank on the first few pages of popular search engines, such as Google and Bing.

Remember how Yell were pressuring people into Yell Adwords? Well, they also force customers into using their own statistics programme. Google Analytics cannot be installed on Yell websites; their alternative is very basic with no information on individual page performance or referrals. Could it be they are trying to hide the number of click-throughs made from Yell.com themselves?

4) Money, Money, Money

Yell is driven by money, and not a lot else. Consider the process of building a website. It begins with finding a domain name, something that costs roughly £6 to purchase. Yell.com, however, are known to charge £45 + VAT. Of course, the cost for the website itself is still to come.

Yell hide their prices behind fast-talking salesmen and wordy packages. As we’ve mentioned before, customers are forced into both Yell AdWord contracts and Yell Analytics. Add to that other useless extras of very little substance, and they have increased the cost of your website significantly. What should have cost a couple of hundred pounds has become a couple of thousand.

What’s more, the use of keywords by Yell.com are very broad, often irrelevant and inaccurate with who they target. Therefore, customers are increasingly likely to advertise for products they may not provide in areas they may not cover. And you best believe you will still have to pay for this!

5) Lack of Control

Did you know that you don’t actually OWN your website or domain name? You are actually renting your website from Yell instead. This leads to a number of problems. First, if you decide to change website providers, you will have to completely start anew. This means a new domain name, meaning you will have to update your advertising, letterheads and more! Also, your rankings on Google will be obsolete; you will have to build their trust as a new website, which could take time.

What’s more, you can’t make changes to your website. Instead, you have to request the changes to Yell themselves. Many reviews suggest these changes are either very late or even not made at all. Google highly ranks websites with fresh content, so this realisation is very problematic.

Visualise can deliver a fully responsive website at a great price.

We don’t hide behind complicated sales talk. We tell you exactly what your getting, and we keep our promises. Therefore, we deliver bespoke, hand-coded, responsive websites that YOU can access yourself. Compatible with Google Analytics, we also provide a full SEO report before the website launch with focused, targeted key words to improve your search rankings. What more could you want? Get in touch with the Visualise team today!