Yell Websites – 9 Reasons Not To Use Yell For Web Design
Why we're not like YELL
Businesses exist to make money or they don’t last long. The best businesses are passionate about delivering results for their clients and customers. At Websites Designed 4U our raison d’etre (that’s posh for the reason we’re in business) is to deliver the best small business websites and online presence within limited budgets. We don’t bullshit and we don’t compromise. We make some money in the process (hopefully), but never to the detriment of our customers.
It’s hard to imagine that Yell, as a multinational company, will be passionate about or committed to your business. Their operations spread over the globe, presumably to make use of cheap labour, and this makes a disconnect between the promises made by the sales team and what gets delivered.
Yell’s product the Yell directory is a big problem in itself. If they sell Pay Per Click (PPC) via Google Adwords then Google takes a big bite out of the income. But, if they sell paid exposure on Yell.com then all the money goes into their pocket. This creates a massive bias towards their product. The big problem with that is, it simply isn’t in the same league as Google AdWords and does not deliver results or even organic search via SEO.
In the same way, everyone, well nearly everyone, stopped using Yellow Pages very few people if any use Yell Directory. The first stop is either Google or facebook – who even thinks about Yell.
The Problems with Yell Website Design
We have experience with customers who have had sites from Yell that were just not working for them. Yell like to target businesses that want an online presence but lack the knowledge to be active in promoting that presence. When you have a business to run and grow you don’t have the time to design and build websites even if you have some of the skills.
1. Aggressive Sales
Yell have a sales team and unfortunately, they will often make promises that their service can’t deliver. What appears to happen is that business owners will be visited by a sales rep at their premises or homes. They will use pressure sales tactics to get a contract signed before they leave.
You can check reports online of small business owners regretting signing up within minutes of signing the contract. Yell make many verbal promises regarding the results but none of this is on the contract seems to be a common complaint; so there is little you can do once you are signed up and they fail to deliver.
2. Contracts
All services with Yell entail a 12-month contract. It is hard with all marketing to know what will work best for you without some experimentation. With Yell, if what you sign up for is not working after a few months… tough, you are stuck with it until the end of the contract.
If you check the reviews on Trustpilot, many customers only give one star and complain about being charged large sums for no results. There are suggestions that many of the 5-star reviews and not genuine.
3. Price
That brings us to the subject of price; Yell presents themselves as cheap but in reality, they are anything but cheap. Websites start from £499. In practice, however, the price for a 15-page site with an OK design can rise to £4000 or more.
The way they bump up the price is by selling in additional services with the additional monthly fees for hosting (£96), advertising services and premium listings on Yell.com. Customers can end up paying nearly £5000 for a site and then being charged around £1200 a month for various services none of which deliver results.
4. By Industry Niche; Poorly Designed Templated Sites
Website design is not Yell’s strength. The main issue goes beyond that the majority of sites in any business category appear to be based on a similar template. Examining the page with development tools you can see where redundant code has been left in, for the sections you don’t need, making the pages bloated and slow.
With a ‘standard template’ approach the “designer”, I use the term loosely, is just filling boxes and you’re left with a site that looks pretty much like many other sites and certainly does not represent your business.
Don’t take my word for it; jump onto Google and search for the following “web design by yell [xxx]” where [xxx] is your particular niche. For example, searching for “web design by yell mechanic” would bring up some websites that Yell.com has built. You’ll sometimes need to scroll down through some Yell.com directory pages, but you’ll almost always get some sites.
5. You Paid for it BUT You Don't Own it!
Now, for the big sting in the tail. If Yell builds a site for you it’s not yours! You pay for the build, they build it, but then effectively you rent it! Your contract may expire after 12 months, but if you want to move away from Yell then you need to build a new site they own the content and images. This is a non-contractual lock-in of sorts because of the potential time and effort involved in moving (but it needn’t be painful). This is clever, some would say devious, way to keep you tied to Yell and the money flowing out of your pocket into theirs.
£4,294.80 for the site. £96 per month hosting. Can’t even download the logo from the site to use as it belongs to Yell.com. Can’t move the site. There is no good technical reason for this. There are other cloud-based systems where you can’t move your site, but sites can be built here for a 10th of the price. This is an aggressive business tactic to make moving away from Yell difficult and is the primary reason why we would never recommend any business to use Yell for web design.
If you want a cost-effective site that is 100% owned by you or your company, that is fully responsive and portable to any hosting services drop us a line – if we can’t help well point you to someone who can.
6. Overpriced Hosting Delivering Little Value
Yell charges around £96 (inc VAT) per month for hosting the website . That works out to £1152 per year and that may not be truly awful, you can get similar-priced hosting for £30 per year or £2.60 per month. That means Yell hosting is around 30 times more expensive than it should be. Not a good place to start.
The Hosting you choose is important and needs to be good value for money not just cheap. You want your website to be fast, responsive, and optimised. Even the best-of-class WordPress hosting can be had for around £250 a year and most businesses do not need to go this far. Even this kind of world-class hosting that far exceeds what Yell delivers is only a fraction of the price.
With Yell your site is not yours and not portable so as a consumer you have no choice to move your site but to more affordable or powerful hosting.
7. Analytics
Analytics is a problem area. Getting Google Analytics installed can be a bit of a pain at the best of times. It is certainly not done by default. Yell support has been known to install the wrong analytics code and then it can take months to get that resolved. With full access to the hosting platform, it’s a five-minute job.
There is no support for Google Tag Manager so it is also difficult to set up any conversion tracking. The premise of digital marketing is that it is far easier to develop if you can understand where your leads are coming from. The weak Yell analytical environment means much of that is lost.
Yell tries to sell you Pay Per Click and other traffic and lead generation services, I can’t understand how they can do a proper job without quality analytics.
8. Support
The consensus appears to be that support is woefully bad. As with many Call Centres, they have been “off-shored” all over the world: India, Philippines, Colombia, and Peru are all places that have seen mentioned. This means that in practice, getting support is a nightmare.
Examples include the time it took to get Google Analytics installed and a client who had spent two years with the wrong phone number on their website.
Have a look at the reviews for Yell on Trustpilot and that will give you an insight into the general feeling about their support (just a hint – it sucks).
9. Yell Marketing Services
Last but not least is that once you have a Yell website you are more likely to use the other services they offer. These include sponsored listings on Yell.com, Google AdWords PPC management, social media advertising, and even their Connect product that pretends to be some sort of small business SEO service.
These other services have been mentioned in other people’s posts (Yell PPC, Yell Advertising, Yell Digital Marketing) and these all have the same sorts of problems as the websites. Aggressive sales, 12-month contracts, and lacklustre results.
As an example, a Yell customer was spending around £1200 per month on some so-called marketing. With no analytics, it was difficult to tell what was or was not working. Their monthly breakdown was something like this:
- £40 per month – Connect (pretends to be affordable SEO)
- £80 per month – Website hosting
- £265 per month – Sponsored listing on Yell.com position #1
- £82.34 per month – Local VIP (another Yell.com sponsored listing bill)
- £47.67 per month – Heavyweight prominence (yet another Yell.com sponsored listing bill)
- £500 per month – PPC + maintenance
- £200 per month – Display + maintenance
When all of these “business promotions” were removed, except for the hosting… nothing changed.
With the right site and support you can spend less and get better results.
Review Summary - What Are People Saying About Yell Websites?
I’ve listed nine key points why using Yell for your website design is not a good idea. The best case is it is an overpriced okay website. The worst case is you have an overpriced shoddy website that you rent but don’t own with little or nothing in the way of analytics. Going with Yell is not a smart move for small businesses where marketing spend needs focused and provide a good return on investment.
I don’t want you to take my word for it. There are many reviews for Yell over on Trustpilot. The below are a few comments taken from the posted reviews from today 11/02/2020.
Backward and forwards from one rep to another endless months of Frustration and eventually not producing what they were contracted to do due to a previously resolved technicality ...4 months for nothing held up the launch of my business....do not touch this company with a barge pole !
I used to be with yell ,poor returns on my advert so I did not advertise this year . Yell have rang 3 times since pestering me ,pressurised sales tactics. Told sales am sorting my own way this year. Posting Facebook etc.
Poor. Expensive.
I recently took out a contact in December they told me that if I recommend Someone else it would take £50 off the bill but this never happened from the get go I had my concerns the sales rep promised me 50% of more capacity work with additional eight men These were false claims. I phoned a representative of Yell And told them that the services was not working for me so they changed my package to garden maintenance Instead of painting and decorating And they told me the additional cost will be an extra £20 On the morning of the 1st of February they tried to bill me for the double amount of £419 and said that they didn’t cancel the painter decorators package in Time so this is the reason why of that amount I refuse to pay it Aaron Bailey my manager will not answer the phone to me or also my representative Terry Maynard I’ve no contact and they’re always on holiday when I try and get hold of them They pressurised me in to changing my package said it would boost More custom. And guess what this hasn’t happened either
But don’t take my word for it – pop over to Trustpilot and check out the reviews yourself:
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