For £26,400 a year plus VAT, Jeanet Ostergaard assumed she would receive high-quality advice on how to make her manufacturing business, Blackfast Chemicals, more visible online. She hired Yell.com after being approached by a sales representative three years ago. The rep was pleasant, appeared knowledgeable and worked for a trusted name — the company that used to publish the Yellow Pages. It seemed like a winning combination.
At first, all went according to plan. Yell helped Blackfast, which is based in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and makes metal blacking chemicals for the engineering and car industries, build a website and produce promotional videos.
However, things started to go wrong when Ostergaard agreed to pay an extra £2,200 a month for search engine optimisation (SEO) services. Instead of