Yodle, ReachLocal, and similar are notorious for high turnover of sales people, aggressive sales tactics, poor quality of product, and high mark up. The internet is littered with negative stories from their clients.

I would suggest looking for a smaller company that also handles SEO, SEM and online marketing. A lot of these companies you will have direct contact with a principal or sales manager, as opposed to a sales person who will be gone in six months. They will also be focused on your growth, which will result in your retention as a client. Yodle, etc are more focused on THEIR rapid growth and impressive numbers so they will look impressive come time for their IPO than their clients growth.

Regardless of who you choose to work with, always get references. There are also a few blog posts by reputable sites like seomoz.org, www.clickz.com that discuss how to choose a good SEO company that I would recommend.

Michael Hayes Replied on Oct. 3, 2011

Thank you for your insight into this. I've heard some bad things about Yodle, but I wanted to reach out and see if more people had information on them. Cheers.

David Rothschild

Director of Marketing, Insight Forge

Posted on Oct. 3, 2011

We've had a few clients that formerly used Yodle & ReachLocal...all really bad things. I agree with Al on the strong arm sales tactics...they bully and intimidate small business owners who hear they should be using Google to attract customers and don't really know anything about it into signing long term contracts with them.

- They hold you to contracts. They will do a great job for a month or two then expect their small business customers to stop paying attention and continue to charge them ridiculous monthly rates. If you complain and want to get out of your contract they will make it a really big hassle, including setting up their own landing page (instead of sending customers directly to your existing website), and threatening to take it down / hurt SEO standings when you quit.

- They disguise how much you are paying by charging you bulk fees. For example, you can't log into your Adwords campaign they are running for you and see what you are actually paying for clicks, because they charge their own fees on top the clicks. You can only log into your custom Yodle management system which they can essentially populate with any data they want. Any good PPC management company should give you direct access to your Adwords account to let you see exactly what they are doing.

- And much more...just Google them and you'll find a ton of negative consumer feedback such as: http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.yodle.com