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Published In: Screenwerk

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Feb 16, 2010
By Greg Sterling

A couple of weeks ago Yodle announced the roll out of an SEO/organic product offering. The cost is $400 per month in addition to any SEM and related spending the advertiser is doing with the company.

Yodle sees this as a complement to its more traditional paid search and network distribution offerings but one that takes longer to show results. As a consequence all the contracts are six months in duration to allow for it to develop and show value to the advertiser.

Yodle Organic involves “on” and “off page” SEO but it’s broader than those terms suggest, providing (sales bullets):

* Personalized consultation with a dedicated marketing specialist to optimize a site for organic search rankings
* Website designing and coding with search engine prescribed best practices
* Video creation and syndication to sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and others
* Custom content creation and syndication across the web
* Distribution of a local business profile to Google, Yahoo and Bing and over 75 local search sites and directories.
* 24/7 access to a performance dashboard that measures progress against goals and much more

Here are a couple of dashboard screens provided by Yodle:


In the pie chart immediately above “direct” means direct navigation to the site and “referring” means the Yodle network of sites beyond search.

There are a lot of screens and tabs, although Yodle’s been thoughtful about how information is presented and about educating the business using the dashboard. I was told by a Yodle competitor that only “5% of SMBs log in to their accounts.” Clearly Yodle will want to drive people to engage with this product, although a good part of the value of the Organic service involves human consultation.

The company is optimizing for a limited keyword set for each client, which expands over time.

I was on with Court Cunningham and sales VP Mike DeLuca discussing the product last week and I asserted that products like this and reputation management/social media tools that don’t require specific media buys are very useful not only in delivering valuable information and services to SMBs but they potentially offer higher margins and are “weapons against churn.”

In general the entire local market is evolving from a pure search and directory focus to a host of services that include things like “data monitoring,” reputation management, CRM and social media optimization in addition to search network distribution.

This appears to me to be a very solid product and one that makes Yodle’s services more valuable.

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