Maxweb Website Design, the Cambridge Joomla webdesign company

Thomson

We had Thomson supply us with listings of businesses in our area that had newly been started, changed owners or moved address.  We used this for telemarketing purposes.  We had a telemarketing company call on our behalf as we did not feel this was one of our strong areas.  The results were disastrous, and had me driving all over the countryside to talk with a few potential customers who were not that interested.  The time would have been better spent in the office.  We did get a database of thousands of business names and contact details, but so far it has not been of much use to us.  The cost was horrendous.

One good thing to say about Thomson however, is that several other directories feed off theirs, so if you have a listing with them you will also feature other places.

Yellow Pages and Yell.com

We went for a medium sized advert in the Yellow Pages, as we reckoned as a serious business we should be listed in YP.  The package also came with a listing in the online portal Yell.com.  We followed advice in how to fashion the advert, even though some of the advice I've seen is contradictory.  Some argue that you should use colour to stand out, others that colour is totally irrelevant.  This package costs over £600 per year.  And what did we get out of it?  Pretty much nothing, except being called up by telemarketers who use YP.  In one year I have probably had just a couple of calls attributable to YP.  The verdict: it's actually worse being listed than not being there, as it would save some annoying phone calls.  Definitely not worth the money. 

Scoot

The gentleman who called me from Scoot promised it would really send visitors to my site and get me business.  At the time Scoot was running a poster campaign in my area, and I had noticed them.  Sadly, the advertising was probably more to get businesses like mine to sign up, and they did not keep it up.  I can't say have noticed any visitor coming to me from Scoot.  Total waste of money.

City Visitor

City Visitor get some good organic search results due to optimisation of their site.  This is the only service I'm considering renewing, because I have in fact had some visitors coming my way from them.

The Best Of

This came recommended from someone who said they had had relatively good results with them.  They seem to advertise mainly via PayPerClick, and they get some good listings on the right column in Google.  However, this is not as good as organic results and the number of visitors to my site from here has been very low so far.  All they seem to offer is actually a kind of managed PPC campaign for you.  You can just as well do that yourself.

Ufindus

A nice gentleman called me up and said that their service would guarantee a minimum of 38 enquiries to my business per month.  Now that sounded like a good investment, but I wanted to know what kind of enquiries.  38 website visitors a month would be OK, but still I could not rely on more than a couple of those actually contacting me and asking about business.  From his explanation I got the impression that these were bona-fide enquiries in the form of emails or phone calls to my business.  Alas, after a couple of months I checked my website stats.  Only 1 visitor had actually clicked through to my website.  I had had no emails or phone calls.  From the small-print in their documentation I am then told that an enquiry is defined as "the number of searches per month that produced a listing where your business is shown".  Now that is almost totally useless!  This means that first someone has to search for something that brings your business up as a result.  Then they have to click on your business, which reduces the "enquiries" with at least a factor of 10, I should think.  So in reality we are maybe talking about 3 website visits a month, and even less of emails and phone calls.  And this for £35 a month?  That's robbery.  I stopped the payments due to what I feel was mis-selling of the service and they will have to sue me if they want any more money.

Why your own SEO is better

Paying £30 a month may not seem that much, and that is what these companies count on.  They sell on fear: can you really afford not to be in their directory?  You bet you can.  30 a month amounts to 360 per year.  Some of them, like Yellow Pages, are even more expensive.  If you use several of them, the amount can quickly come to more than a 1000 a year, every year.  If we look at it over a 5 year period, you will pay a massive £5000.  What if you instead had taken that money and put into optimisation of your own site?  It is almost certain that you then would be among the highest rated sites for your field, which could give you massive results.

Remember that when you optimise your site you could reap the rewards for many years to come, so you need to look at it over a longer perspective.

I already have a lot better results from optimising my own site than from online directories, and I have not really started yet.  I have done a good deal of keyword research, but haven't had time to act on much of it yet.  I have made a few optimised pages, but there is still a lot more I could do.  This has convinced me that the best return on investment for me is search engine optimisation.  The only cost for me is my time, for you it may be a bit different if you choose to pay someone to do it, but the fact remains: you will get a lot more for your money.

We could get the same results for you as for our own site, so please contact us to hear how we could help.