The in-house agency vs. outside agency debate gets settled for once and for all!

While working at a comapny doing paid search, I went over the debate of whether to hire an outside firm to do the paid search, or to leave to an in-house team.

It seems that Dave Pasternack has p*wned me, claiming that there is no situation in which an in-house agency will beat the outside agency. In a way I understand where he's coming from, as an independent SEM practitioner, I have much more access to general knowledge than I did in-house. However, that was waay to generalized, and everyone else in the comments have jumped on him for making that type of generalization.

Sweet.

About Results Marketing is a Los Angeles Internet Marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses market themselves online effectively.

Add Reachlocal to the Local Search Providers that SMB's Hate?

This is a continuation on the Yodle experiences post... We're trying to figure out how well the local search companies perform.

I had an interesting meeting with a client. She burned through two different PPC providers, and is currently being screwed by an SEO firm doing the "top 10 on an insignificant keyword" crap. She wants a company that specializes in SEO for criminal law firms. Anyway, dealing with that is a sales skill :)

She asked me if I outsource any of my work. I told that depending on the type of project I do outsource. I gave the example of clients that have too small a budget - where I give them out to local search companies - like Yodle or ReachlocalThe thing was that she had used reachlocal - and wasn't very happy with them. She'd dumped them 6 months ago.

She is a lawyer - running solo, and she had been getting phone calls for things that she doesn't do. This quite sad, as from what I see, the concept of Yodle and Reachlocal, and they should be good. Maybe because they undersell their products, they can't give individual attention (or they are hiring incompetents).

I noticed with Yodle as well, that they missed a whole category of keywords for accounting - CPA keywords. That is simply unacceptable. I shouldn't be having to fix that for them.

These things shouldn't happen in companies focused on Paid and Natural search. Not if they are assisting (supposedly) thousands of clients.

I'm very disappointed in them. They should do better, and I really wish I could outsource smaller clients to them, and allow people who can't afford $3,000+ a month to advertise online. Meanwhile, I think I'll be sticking to doing the dirty work myself. :(

For the sake of my sanity, someone please share with me a positive story? I want a good company to give smaller clients to, and feel good about it.

Andrew Shotland Wants to know about Local Search Providers. The Yodle Story:

Andrew Shotland at localseoguide wants to know about the local SEM providers. So here's a little yodle story for you guys. I think they are a great company - and do a pretty good job - although my hard-hitting client wasn't so happy. I ended up doing the work myself :(

I used yodle.com for a client - an accountant. I promised them that if it worked out, I'd send them more business. I had built my own marketing campaign to compare, and there were a couple of differences.

1) They didn't do any geo targeting - just stuck to geotargeted words
2) They had it on 24/7 - while I had mine set for business hours.
3) They missed an entire segment of keywords (cpa etc.) which is more profitable.

At the end of the day though, they also were spread out across all of the engines, I had only started with Google, and their cost per action was a couple dollars less than mine.

However, my client wasn't happy with the amount of cancellations that happened via the yodle website. Most of them canceled before coming in. The yodle rep just told me that "for some reason accountants get the lowest conversion rates"...

Bottom line is though, there's alot of garbage going on in local search. Alot of people that aren't willing to plop down $1,000 / month on me, have been sold on the "we'll get you number one on the big keywords and give you a free website for $100 / month".

Yodle is a great company, and although it didn't work out for my client, I'm sure they'll do great things. It's a shame that I burnt a bridge because of a client. I'm also interested to know how Reachlocal is doing though. They were another company I wanted to test and see how well they do, what their minimum's are etc.

Yodle's official cost is a $1500 setup fee and $550 / month + phone minutes. (I got them down to a $400 setup fee).