Forum Moderators: open
Dave.
Their traffic is fraud anyway, well, there's a testimonial that says so......... You've got to be careful, although they do have some nice partners - ZDNet, Financial Times and 24 7 Real Media (if it's true).
I guess it's one of those judgement calls, but at £100 yikes, it's damn pricey for a basic listing.
If you are looking for sales leads then it may be a good place to invest in their ppc program. A visitor to business.com may be closer to the purchasing end of the buying cycle than someone clicking around through Google who may be gathering information.
I have found, for my area, that there are many terms that are more reasonably priced than Google. For my area, traffic is higher than findwhat, and none of it looks sketchy- so far so good. I'm currently testing them out. Will wait before giving my final judgement.
As for the directory listings, I'm not seeing as much traffic on that.
-no traffic (5-6 referals a month)
-got listed in low pr category page with many links on the page
-the listing opened in a framed page, and caused problems logging on to my site.
-asked for a refund and got it
This is what Directories are - 'Pages of information' and web pages of links.
The problem is that in order to attract traffic, we need information (that's what people want). But at the same time, company owners want to increase the chances of being clicked on. So, we now have a bit of a problem. How to satisfy both groups.
But this is what Yell, Yahoo, Google offer so looks like we just have to live with that, as noone is in real favour of the client.....
But some have got it right, some like Toxic Lemon who want £10 for a listing - now that's very good value for money, as you get a link. But Business.com, at £99 for a link is way to pricey, and all directories seem to be heading towards the strategy of charging major cash for web links.
I think this sort of practise is here to stay. Personally I'd steer clear of business.com, until they reduce their tariffs significantly.
I know it's about money, but if a service is that good, they shouldn't need to disguise anything. Companies like these are their own worst enemy, the time will come when people get wise to all these tricks, and people just won't use em anymore.
It's just the same thing as Kanoodle and all the others.
Advertising where your competitors are - come on that's just dumb, nobody's going to want that. It's crazy. And the very media that's posing as the 'expert' is actually forcing it's clients to do this.......
Good grief.
The sad thing is, they are in the process of hand removing every single B2C site in their directory and moving to a strictly B2B stance. I just had mine removed yesterday, they are offering a pro-rated refund though.
If they changed their mind tommorow about allowing B2C sites back in I'd fork over the money.
Basically a PPC listing saves the need to find dozens of tiny publishers and directories and make individual deals with each. But you pay for this privilege.
Cheers,
CaboWabo
Last month they moved me to a new cat 7 clicks deep on a PR2 page. It was good while it lasted, but I wont renew that site.
A second site I'll add next month. The cat page has a PR4. This page shows up in the serps for some of my keywords, so the chances of traffic improve. If you believe that local rank counts for anything, then I hope to get some benefit from that as well.
I personally do not think business com is as good an investment as in years gone by they are tending to put those who pay the $99 fee onto lower and lower pages each time i submit a new site so suspect will not be renewing any more new sites and not paying as others come up for renewal
They have chosen to go down the route of PPC like many other se/ directories ,
may well look at ppc with them at some stage but directory may not be as good as it was
steve
CaboWabo
Did you get lots of enquiries though?
We track everything very well, and they were right in line with our other online advertising.
CaboWabo
Their staff has been very helpful and responsive.
The cost (for us) is a little higher than Adwords and a little lower than Over.
They are in the top 15 for overall referrers to our site.
It obviously gets traffic, but how much exactly? 1 million per year, month - what?
