Yodle, Inc. A Six Month Long Headache with Complete Web Illiterates Internet

I don't see how the people who work at this company can go home to their spouses and not self loathe enough to have no libido. If you're reading this, you're probably someone who is already pissed off by these people, or a few e-signatures away from becoming pissed off by these people. I work as a marketing coordination for a small business that is a franchise of a larger corporation, and we were looking to revamp our web marketing. Yodle were one of a couple choices that stood out to my boss. I never understood why, but despite showing him all the stuff on BBB, here, and even entire articles dedicated to this scam, he still decided that they were the best choice.

This is probably because in their first call, they start their lying. They say they are "the experts" in your field! Whether its shoveling dog poop or selling weapons, I'm sure these guys always assert themselves as the experts. Not only are they experts in your field, they're experts at the internet! Just kidding though, the only thing they're experts at is lying and not feeling like a sack of garbage for it -- if you're at Yodle and are reading this, have you ever considered running for local office?

Of course, they're not experts at anything. I have a very limited knowledge of HTML- learned how to build an ugly website when I was 12 - and these guys did not know a single thing. Time after time I had to tell my so called "web expert" how to color text, make links, and insert images. Not to mention how to spell -- if you claim to be "web content experts",you should know how to spell words and arrange them in a way that doesn't sound like Hindi put through google translate. Not only that, but they claim to work with companies like Yext and be Google Partners and all this other really fancy stuff that can lure someone who is not too knowing about web presence techniques into their six month long and very expensive trap. This very special position of being a google partner is a bit misleading. They're a "Premier SMB Partner", which if you google it, seems like a whole lot of marketing. You should be aware there's well over 700 (that's all I bothered to count because it seemed endless) SMB partners just in web / internet marketing alone. Not only that, but after getting a marketing call from Yext, we learned they actually did not work with Yext at all.

I'm honestly one of the most patient people that I've ever met, and these guys drove me up a complete wall almost every day. There's always some mistake. My coworker has been working on correcting over a hundred improperly done listings almost all week now, and getting the smallest change done to your web content or code is IMPOSSIBLE! Especially the code, since they use Webs templates and are literally not allowed to touch it. Did anyone else use freewebs a decade ago? They use those. You can pick a very similar website up for $10 a month through the source. You can seriously only pick from 4 predetermined color schemes for your page and from like 6 different templates, so actually Freewebs wins this round.

I'm a currently enrolled college student and hope to become an SEO marketer one day, and let me say that from what I have learned at my university, these guys will end up throwing your ranking into a bottomless (but flaming) pit if you let them do what they want. They encourage you to spoof your locations, give you spoof phone numbers that makes google ignore you, duplicate your content, and will only ever make you appear for the most irrelevant search terms. Spoiler alert, nobody is googling "66048 waste removal" for your garbage company in Kickapoo. Our four yodle websites generated 1 lead. Not each, total. We have had then for six months and now that we want to cancel, our rep just isn't returning our calls. It's too late for us, we've already blown a couple thousand, but if you're a small business owner just save yourself while you can!

Don't believe me? When they show you an example site during your sales presentation, write down the number on the page. Call someone random from your own industry with Yodle and see how that one is working for them. I'm willing to bet they won't be raving, or better yet, the number will be disconnected because they packed their s**t and left.