Yodle

Its so well organized and very user friendly! We talked to Beth and he was amazing! Great customer service!

We had Yodle handle our law firm web marketing for almost a year. The results were far, FAR less than they promised. We made it clear we had a limited budget and they assured us they'd work with it. They had a law division which catered to law firms. We reasonably assumed they had an idea what they were doing.

1. They set up their landing website which was very generic, but never told us to provide them with content (i. E. profiles, FAQ's etc) until about 5 months later when I had called to ask them to change some things. The individual asked me why I had never provided content and I told him no one said I could or asked me to.

2. We have our own domain and website, but they did not use it and set up content on their own domain. We had been using Google Adwords for many months and Yodle never mentioned this was a problem, again, until about 5 months after they had started marketing with us. The service guy from Yodle explained that we were essentially competing with Yodle in our adwords buy -- NO ONE had mentioned this at Yodle when we started with them.

3. Because they set up their own domain (which they will not give ownership to you), Google ends up dropping your organic search ratings because they see two domains pointing to the same company.

I ended up cancelling them and raising hell. They finally settled out by refunding the last three months of service and running our ad-site with them for the next 3 months, but frankly, it was simply a wash for us. I really felt they had zero clue what they were doing with us.

On the other hand, if you have ABSOLUTELY NO WEB PRESENCE, then Yodle is probably a good start for you. Just make sure you know exactly what they are going to do and bargain them down in price. Their "plans" are very flexible in price and they will try to stick you into a high-priced plan, but don't go for it. You will find they will bend as much as 50% on those prices.

Go ahead and email me about it. I can show you bills and web logs. We have another service now and are very happy with it -- and the monthly rate is far less.

I sat through a 2+ hour presentation with a very professional & clever salesman that I believe did a good job of selling his product. Unfortunately, he over SOLD Yodle's services and he collected my money that day.

The following business day I had a phone call from Yodle's very inexperienced (but patient and considerate) representative to setup my website and after 2 hours trying to setup a website (round peg into a square hole) that needed certain real estate specific features it was apparent this product would not work well for my business. I politely asked to speak to the customer services person that could help me because the product did not provide what my business needed.

Enters Allen, Manager of Changes to Contracts with Yodle, who in the end was very condescending and never considered just parting ways since this was the first day of trying to setup things. You would think after learning that their generic business websites did not fit what I needed for my business that as a reputable company they would consider letting me go as a customer without a fight because things were not working out on day one. Also, I would hope that a company like Yodle would not have a business plan or goal to try and collect fees for services that have never been provided and have less than a 24 hours history with their company. But NO Allen continued to threaten to charge twice as much as I payed up front for the first months service and setup and would not consider just keeping the agreed upon setup fee charged. I had only asked for a refund for the future services I had not received.

I would not recommend taking a chance on Yodle until they change their combative strong arming of customers. They should understand in the initial setup (first day they start to provide a service) that if things are not working out they should let someone go because there are times that salespeople over sell a product, inexperienced employees as they learn may not have proper answers and hard edged Customer Service managers can turn off a customer for life.