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 shooting up Google’s search rankings, Blackfast found activity on its website stagnating. Obscure blogs had begun linking to the site, causing Google’s search algorithm to lose trust in Blackfast and promote rivals above it for certain search terms.
To make matters worse, one of the key search terms being promoted was “antiquing fluid”, which makes up just 2% of Blackfast’s sales. The main business was receiving almost no attention.
“There wasn’t any increase in traffic, put it that way,” said Ostergaard, 50, who is Blackfast’s managing director. “The biggest lesson is to learn a bit more about the subject before you invite in the so-called professionals.”
Blackfast is one of many small businesses to complain about their treatment by Yell, which printed its last edition of the Yellow Pages earlier this year. Company owners have complained of aggressive selling techniques and poor customer service once contracts have been signed. Some have said in online posts that they have lost sales as a result.
Yell’s holding company, Hibu Group, was once part of BT and has been owned by a consortium of bondholders since it collapsed into administration six years ago under a £2.3bn debt pile. As the Yellow Pages became obsolete, Hibu has reinvented itself as a provider of digital support to small businesses.
The company is rumoured to be up for sale. Its owners have already sold its businesses in Spain and Latin America. Yell’s long-serving boss, Richard Hanscott, left the business in March and was replaced on an interim basis by David Sharman, Hibu’s chief executive. One source close to the company said Yell was trying to cut costs ahead of the sale.
Offering advice on SEO and other internet services to small businesses is a growing part of Yell’s operation, but company owners have complained that the service provided often does not match up to the price they pay.
Yell calls its staff “the digital marketing experts”, but some of the work is outsourced to the Philippines. That does not include the SEO function, but does include some of the website building for small companies.
Some entrepreneurs have also discovered that their websites are promoted on blogs that have absolutely no relevance to their business. For example, an obscure American blog on Nascar racing — the American stock car competition — promoted a link to a waste disposal company in Banbury, near Oxford, which was a client of Yell’s.
While “link building”, as it is known, is not illegal, it is certainly not effective. The technique could once fool Google into promoting certain websites, but it no longer works. The tech giant has repeatedly updated its search algorithm in an attempt to identify businesses that are manipulating their search rankings.
Danny Richman, an SEO consultant who runs a training school for small businesses and competes with Yell for some clients, said the company needed to be more accountable for the service it offers.
“Companies such as Yell aim to provide an SEO service at scale and at a price that is affordable to micro businesses,” said Richman. “In these cases, there is little option but for them to cut corners and outsource to countries where labour is cheaper and the quality standards may be lacking.”
Richman has analysed 35 Yell clients and found that all but seven experienced lower traffic in the 12 months after signing up for its SEO service. The research was carried out using an analytics tool called Ahrefs.
Other business owners say they were lured to Yell by its trustworthy name and promises of improved sales — but have, in fact, been left worse off.
Jake Harvey, owner of the Smart Repair Centre garage near Colchester, signed up to Yell last year. He wanted technical help for the business to appear on Apple Maps and was convinced to pay for extra advertising services on top. He signed up for a year-long deal at £170 a month.
Harvey said that after five months, the business still did not appear on Apple Maps and the advertising had not worked. Online advertising would normally generate eight calls a day, but the garage has received just 42 since January, he added.
Harvey tried to cancel the contract, but was told that it was not possible. “They told me, ‘Tough luck, you’re in a contract, suck it up’,” said Harvey, 26.
The dispute has had a direct impact on the company, Harvey said. “This is a small family business. There are guys here who won’t get bonuses because of what happened.”
Yell said it was investigating the complaints made by Blackfast and the Smart Repair Centre.
