I’ve been getting some hard sell phone solicitation from Yelp about advertising with them. They say they will add content to my page, which is empty right now, and put me in a prominent position. For doing this I would pay them 20 bucks for every time someone looking for a home inspector clicks on my page. This seems kind of steep to me but their salesperson started showing me graphs that indicate that 95% of those people who view your page will end up using your services and therefore I would be foolish not to advertise with them if I want to grow my business,.
I am skeptical about this and was wondering if any other internachi inspectors had any experience with Yelp or had any opinions about it.
Thanks, Jeffry, Willamette Home Inspection
The salesman is flat out lying. Since the ‘views’ cost the shopper nothing they will go to many different vendors to see what they offer. 95% of them will buy from someone is likely true, but not necessarily from you. When I go on yelp looking for a restaurant I might look at 2-10 different restaurants and might visit their websites if listed, I do usually end up in one of them but not every one I whose page I view. Tread carefully unless you have a large budget for advertising.
I tried YELP about a month ago after being lobbied pretty hard with phone calls. They gave me $100 in free advertising. The problem was that they are terribly expensive. It was $11 per click and I would have had to pay additional fees to customize the ad. They basically have fees for everything, I added pictures to the ad but the couldn’t change the default picture on the ad without paying a monthly fee. I can’t imagine how they keep any paying clients. I canceled after 2 weeks and 7 clicks. Google Adwords are a fraction of that cost and reach far more viewers.
Thanks for your input guys, it really is a red flag when some salesperson starts telling you, that you would be stupid not to advertise with them.