Yodle

Spoke to two different salesmen about a month apart and got two different stories as to the value that they offer. First was SEO for organic searches and the second was that they could somehow make my Adwords budget go farther because they were a Google partner and could spread me across a bunch of search engines.

I have an in house marketing department that is familiar with SEO so I turned down the first caller, but the second time they called and claimed they could lower my Adwords CPC so I asked for a more detailed explanation as to how that would work. The salesman just kept repeating that it would save me money by:

A) using more keywords (which is has no bearing on price)
B) that i would appear higher on the page (I am already appearing in the first ad position all the time since I am willing to pay more to do so)

It was like a scene from a boiler room movie on wall street in the 80s complete with cheering in the background when somebody else closed a sale. Very high pressure sales pitch, little or no technical knowledge about how they will actually accomplish their miraculous claims and when questioned about it.

Both salesmen became very defensive when asked simple business questions and the second one actually hung up on me after refusing to answer my questions about how they could make my money go farther.

While there are some (albeit few) yodle success stories out there, my experience certainly doesn't inspire confidence. I will not be using their services and will caution others to carefully consider other options before deciding to become a Yodle client.

I was contacted by a Yodle solicitor a couple of weeks ago, (late July 2016), and as a small business owner, I'm always considering more efficient ways to promote my business through the internet medium. What the initial sales rep told me sounded like a good value, though my business cash flow has been slow lately, and I wasn't ready to commit to any new program right now. After telling him that, he told me would turn me over to his manager if I could hold on. As an ex-trained salesman myself, I knew he might be headed for the "TO" as they say. The manager began asking me "closing questions" that pushy salespeople believe will lead to the embarrassment of the customer, who will then feel intellectually obligated to purchase. After trying several "pushy" high pressure questions on me, and not listening to my feelings or circumstances I felt would not permit me to buy anything right now, I decided to hang up on the jerk! I don't buy anything the first time I see it or hear about it! I have learned in life to weigh all decisions carefully and deliberately. This company may have a worthwhile service; although reading many of the reviews here would indicate otherwise. But to employ high pressure tactics to get customers to capitulate, is an insulting and indignifying sales method that I have no respect for! Screw "Yelp"!

I hired Yodel after long and careful consideration and after 5-6 months of dismal performance and a lot of $ out of pocket canceled the service. My big problem is: Yodle was negligent in taking down my site and damaged my practice by redirecting anyone searching my key words to their dead site with a dysfunctional phone #.

I kept calling Yodle, who are very nice on the phone BTW, but totally incompetent at preforming basic operations on my account critical to my practice. Like cancellation! Yodle now after 4 calls and 3+ months still have not taken down the links and site. Not only was this service very poor in performance, dealing with them is like VD. Yodle is the gift that keeps on giving, making you pay months after you terminate them. They are good at promising and very poor on follow up. Not just one one individual, but at multiple echelons of the organization. I asked the last manager to personally call me when he could confirm the site was down and he said no, he would send an email. He refused to give me POC at the legal department as well. Nice huh?
Yodle might work for some businesses but is definitely not for a professional service company of any kind based on my experience.
Kyle Jensen Architect, Orlando FL

We didn't get one single lead or phone call after 90 days with the service. The customer service was good, but the service itself was garbage for us. A complete waste of money.

Let me begin by saying my girlfriend claims i'm a marketers worst nightmare. I question everything and i'm always skeptical. Well, I was suckered in and bought the hype. I was asked initially if my business could handle 100 new clients in three months. Of course! After listening to the sales pitch and the cost I reasoned that 3 new clients would pay for the ad. It turns out that was highly optimistic. After 30 days only twelve leads as follows: Wrong numbers, correct numbers but more sales pitches, right number but for the previous company etc. You get the idea. It was also not explained to me that they would never link to my website, it only goes to their generic one so my website truly gets pushed further down the list. If you cancel the ad, your listings disappear immediately. By the way, yodle will respond to every internet complaint with a generic response to call them and see if they can resolve the issue. They have been looking into my issues for days now, no refund issued, and no advertising either. They have my money for the second month but the ad campaign has been suspended. If there is no response I wonder if fraud charges may be in order since they took my money under false pretenses. I find it interesting that they respond to online negative comments almost immediately, but customer complaints take days for them to "investigate" and respond.

Be careful! Yodle claims that they drive a huge percentage of their current clients traffic volume (which they "prove" by counting the number of times people his their custom splash page and/or call a custom phone number).

What's the catch? Yodle co-opts (hi-jacks) all, yes all of your previous online links and drives users to the splash page so it appears that they are working harder than they are. Example: I paid thousands of dollars to a local PR firm to do some great media outreach for our company, which they did. Prior to our opening all of the links went to a splash page yodle built for us, with our own phone number on it.

The day Yodle launched Keywords, suddenly all of those previous media mentions, online banners (both of which I paid for SEPARATELY FROM YODLE) are linking to the "Yodle" splash page for us. And their dashboard reports that - wow - aren't they driving great results for us with so many calls? 6% of the total traffic came from keywords (Yodle's work) and the other 94% came from our own hard work and spend across other media vehicles.

Yodle has co-opted my marketing plan and has claimed success that they have nothing to do with. They are snake oil artists, in my experience.

YODLE IS A RIP-OFF! Their salesmen are top grade, and they will constantly call with their sales school tactics to swindle you into agreeing to advertise with them. We fell for the hype of them increasing business for us as they promised we would receive 20-40 new customers and averaging 20k to 40k in increased revenue! Guaranteed water heater jobs are what the salesman promised... never got any. We had calls come in but they were not quality. There were a total of 8 calls only 1 generated $180.00 revenue. We received a bunch of solicitation calls from other SEO companies trying to get us to advertise with them. A lot of useless calls that lead no where! We never received verification for google as yodle said we would. Salesman said we would profit $1000 minimum a month, to guarantee the advertising campaign with them paid for itself... LIE! We never found ourselves on the first page of Google! We googled plumbers in our area and never came up. We have definitely gained more wrong number calls or customers from far ranging service areas. Calling in to complain has just gotten us passed from representative to representative. Save yourself the headache with these guys.

John was very helpful on the phone, and I would give him 5 stars. He helped me with corrections I wanted to make on the website. He offered good suggestions and feedback. We are new customers, so marketing results are still unknown at this point. The reason I am giving Yodle 3 stars overall is that the website they initially put up could have been any solar company's site because it was so generic. If I were a site visitor I would have thought it was a scam. It was not well thought out, and there was so much repetition it was unbelievable. They did not consult our current website for information, so it was useless as a marketing tool. I spent alot of time rewriting their material, and then when they posted it, I still had to carefully proofread due to the numerous misspelled words, missing capitals, etc. That is what I called and worked with John on correcting. The overall website work has not been very professional, and for that reason I have been very disappointed. That said, the website is finally coming together, and with a few more touches, I am hopeful that this marketing will actually do what they said it would do. Overall anytime I have spoken with a customer service person they have been great to work with. They just need their writers do a better job researching the client before they start writing, and do a better job with the basics of punctuation and basic grammar.

From the beginning, they have been extremely helpful and responsive in helping me get my small, new business in front of great customers. The team at Yodle is competent and courteous. Their work to drive calls to my phone have resulted in over a 1100% return on investment (no I didn't put too many zeroes on that number). Their pay-per-click campaign has been well worth the investment and their program optimizes my investment meaning they tell me when I am investing enough to drive traffic to our business (yes, a company that will actually not keep coming back telling me to give them more money unless there is actual a value to me). This high level of integrity and proven results for my business gives them a well-deserved 5 stars without a doubt. I have recommended them to 4 colleagues who have also seen great results from the Yodle team. Finally, I will say that their website design and their mobile site design is beautiful to not only me but my customers. I have had over a dozen customers tell me that "my website is really nice". I will finally add that it takes time for ANY PPC to work. It was two months before I saw some volume but now after 7 months, the volume continues to increase.

I have never written a review anywhere. I have to write a review for Terrell at Yodle. He provides the best customer service of all time. He speaks with the right tones, with clarity, concise, precise, patience, understanding, give suggestions. For example, he suggested that I enter an email for a customer of mine for a review, I entered that customer's email address, and in 30 minutes my customer wrote me a long paragraph review. He proved to me that he is real, effective, and means business (literally). I truly believe that with Terrell's suggestions and the help of Yodle, I can grow my business exponentially. Year 2016, here I come!

I NOMINATE TERRELL (AGENT EMILY CAMPOS AND YODLE) FOR RECIPIENT OF NOBEL PRIZE IN BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE.