United Kingdom & Ireland

Meet the team behind the Yellowtom local business search engine!

Who are the people behind the online marketing of Yellowtom?

Yellowtom’s web marketing partner is a company called WebCertain which is one of the leading search engine optimisation agencies worldwide. The company’s Managing Director, Andy Atkins-Krüger is invited to speak around the world on search engine optimisation and appears regularly at conferences in places such as Berlin, Chicago, Las Vegas, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam and Seattle. He personally leads the Yellowtom web marketing team.

How does Yellowtom work with Google?

Firstly, Yellowtom is a search engine in its own right.Each time a user puts a search term into the Yellowtom search box, the whole Yellowtom database of advertisers is queried and the best, most relevant results presented to the user.This means that the WebCertain technical team actually understands how search engines work – because they built and manage one.

How do the team approach the marketing of Yellowtom?

The WebCertain team studies the behaviour of users of the Yellowtom local search engine and strives to deliver an online service which means the users will return time and time again – because they received a good service. The Yellowtom web site is under constant development as a result of these studies and constantly adds new features and tools for users.

In addition, because Yellowtom is a search engine in its own right, the technical search engine optimisation team has a very detailed idea of how the major search engines – including Google – actually function.So it’s not difficult to ensure that Yellowtom is highly effective at appearing prominently in Google, Yahoo and MSN Live’s results.

What is Yellowtom’s search engine strategy?

Obviously, Yellowtom wants its advertisers to benefit from visitors coming in their thousands from Google and works to position its content in such a way that its pages rank well in the Google results pages.However, Yellowtom’s technical team also works hard to ensure that an extremely wide range of keywords – literally hundreds of thousands of very varied keywords – appear in good positions in Google and other search engines.

A lot of highly complex technology is working behind the scenes to make the Yellowtom site so friendly to the major search engines and this is also under constant development.

How does Yellowtom perform against competitors?

No one has an accurate statistic to compare live web sites accurately.However, Yellowtom has seen its traffic more than double in the last year and continues to be the point of call for people looking for business in all areas in which it is active.As each town is added, the whole system becomes stronger for users and franchisees.What we can say is that annual growth of visitors to the site is currently running at around 200% per annum.

What information does an advertiser get in terms of telling them how their advertisement is working?

There is a lot of data behind the scenes, so the Yellowtom team has lots of information about how the system is working.  However, what keeps bringing advertisers back is that they have people knocking at the door or on the phone saying they’d found them on Yellowtom.

What is the Alexa Toolbar?

The Alexa Toolbar is a system that tries to show how many visitors are landing on different web sites.Unfortunately, the toolbar is abused by unscrupulous sales people to sell unpopular web sites.This is because the Alexa figures are taken from a toolbar which not very many people use (Do you know anyone who has it?).So you can fake a good performance by loading the Alexa toolbar and then loading your own site in your office.Yellowtom does NOT do this.

Why don’t you sell the Yellowtom franchise opportunity more on the home page?

It’s true that many competitors do this.But they are trying to sell franchises.Yellowtom believes that franchises sell themselves because the site’s customers – the public – love using the site.Appealing to franchisees doesn’t help the public!!

What is Google page rank?

Google page rank is a score from 0 to 10 which shows on web pages that have been crawled by Google.The higher a page is linked to by others, the higher the page rank.Unfortunately, Google does not update the page rank regularly – usually every three months – so these days it’s not very helpful or accurate.It is possible for pages with a 0 page rank to appear for highly competitive terms.