Hi, I have just had another 3 calls from Yell.com, they must be desperate. Honestly, I nearly hung up on the guy earlier, I lost count of the times I told him I'm not interested. He has now insisted in gathering stats and is ringing me later!
Needless to say I am not going to bother, I'm maybe too soft and don't have enough of the eff off vibe. Anyway, I was wondering about Google adwords. I have never tried these before and was wondering how they work and if anyone else has had any success?
Yes, I think it's the norm to get a £75 free voucher when you register, I used that and got 2 new clients. You can pause it any time you wish, and top up when the credit has been used.
After buying some credit, I've had a further client and a few enquiries, so I think it works OK. Am currently paused as trying to get up the rankings 'naturally' using SEO through the new website, plus I'll be going on holiday at the end of next week so not too bothered about new enquiries. Will probably give it a big effort in September.
I think I will give this a go after I redesign my site, they occasionally send me through a £50 voucher, which lies unused. I was just worried about having loads of spam clicks for people wanting to sell me rubbish and a large bill being run up.
At the end of the day, the person who clicks on the link couldn't care less whether you pay or not, and you will get that, but that's the nature of the beast. Not seen any large increases in nuisance calls.
I think you can also cap the amounts that you pay on a daily basis - basically, when that's spent, your ad won't appear for the rest of the day.
I've just started with Google Ads again (after a long while of not using it... although I did get a client when I last used Google Ads) as I don't have time to dedicate to SEO to get my natural rankings up. There's all sorts of settings on it so you can target where the ads appear (eg just on the Google search page) or any page that accepts google ads. You can even override the automatic settings to choose the day(s) and time(s) that your ad appears.
If you combine it with Google Analytics (which is free), you can see where your "clicks" are coming from in more detail, which might help you in designing your website in the long run.
The only thing I would say about the Google Ad vouchers, is they sometimes have terms & conditions which say it can only be used with a new account, so it's worth checking this. So if you do have a voucher with a restriction, don't set up your Google Ads account until you are ready to use the voucher.
Also - have you registered with the TPS? This can cut down on some of the spam phone-calls, in general, and you will be able to tell Yell that you are so registered and could report them.
Thanks guys, I have registered with the TPS, but it doesn't stop the foreign calls. I placed a free ad on Gumtree recently, and almost immediately I received a ton of the dodgiest looking emails I have ever seen, most of them in really badly written English from companies abroad offering accountancy services. I do have a google analytics account but haven't fully completed my profile yet.
I will definitely give the google ads a go once I get my site redesigned.
