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Court Cunningham, Yodle’s CEO, recently talked about Yodle being “experts in automation” and that’s reflected in their recently launched organic product’s method of link building. Here is how it appears to work: The customer writes an article/blog post on Yodle’s website, local.yodle.com, and links back to their own site. This allows Yodle to pass the power of their own domain to their customers. Interesting.

What’s brilliant from an “automation expert” point of view is that they turned the job of creating content over to the customer; eliminating the time and cost of producing good content. Here’s an example.

The client’s original site needs to be seen to be believed— here it is. So, I have little doubt that Yodle can help them or that this small business owner knows a single thing about web marketing for that matter. But my problem with this from a customer stand point is that the link building is being done on the site created by Yodle, the .net version of the domain. Which means they are just renting the SEO. Because there is such a long time investment required in an organic campaign this represents the SEO version of holding a gun to the client’s head if they wish to cancel.

Or perhaps Court Cunningham is trying to automate a solution to the churn problem.

What are your thoughts on this type of SEO? Does the customer’s level of sophistication matter here? Is this the future SEO business model?

At Christmas I got a Droid. That’s good.

I had 10 months left on my T-mobile contract. That’s good for you.

Here’s the offer. You get the G1 for free. You need to agree to take over my contract.

What’s in it for you:

• Free G1
• Contract Expires in October, so you are only locked in for 10 mos., NOT 2 years like me!
• The phone is awesome, only slightly less awesome than the droid

What’s in it for me:

• I get my $200 T-mobile penalty back

Contract Details:

The contract is $49.00/mo for 400 minutes on T-Mobile. With that you have access to the internet on wifi, phone, music player. Kind’ve like an ipod touch with Gmail and a phone.
Optional: Add $30 month for data plan to get on 3g.

If you need any addt’l info you can ask in the comments below. If you’re interested please use the contact form near the bottom of this page.

Last week Google formally launched its Click-to-Call functionality in Adwords. Greg Sterling spoke with Paul Feng, Google’s Group Product Manager for Mobile Ads, about this new feature. Feng said that some advertisers in Google’s Click-to-Call tests saw improvement in CTR’s up to 30%, compared to ads on the PC. Sterling goes on to hypothesis that the local number provides additional credibility, making the user more inclined to click or call.

I share Sterling’s theory about the power of a local number in CTR. We’ve been including local numbers in service business ads for some time now, and they consistently outperform ads without numbers. Sure, with the numbers in we have less room for creative, but if CTR is better it’s a no brainer.

So after reading that Google made Click-to-Call functional we set it up for a garage door repair company in Las Vegas. We thought Click-to-Call would be a pretty good thing for them. Mobile users in Las Vegas looking to repair the garage door would be able to call for service right away, no need to go through the website.

So we followed Googles “2 Simple Steps” for setting this up:

1)Set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business location nearest to them (as determined by the phone’s location awareness technologies, GPS, triangulation).
2)Check that you’ve chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.

After making these simple changes to your campaign settings, you should see something resembling the picture above.

Split Your Campaign Into PC and Mobile

We decided to split our campaigns into two groups: One for just mobile, and one for just Desktops.
This way we can tailor the content of the ad and their landing pages to the mobile user. Plus we want to see just how effective these ads are against the regular ones.

Anyway, we set everything up and then pulled out our iPhones and Droids to test it. Here’s what we saw.

The click to call number wasn’t displaying! The address was showing, so we knew we got it right. What happened?

How come my address shows in my ads, but my phone number is missing?

We double and triple checked our settings and ads. Everything was set up correctly, but why wasn’t the phone number displaying? The AdWords Help page wasn’t useful, offering only the advice to make sure you haven’t set up custom targeting to show an address with the ad. We hadn’t.

We finally threw in the towel and contacted AdWords support. Here’s the answer we got:

So if you’re having the same problem getting your Click-to-Call numbers displaying, don’t worry. Google just needs time to catch up.

Guest Post by Chris Keenan.
Chris Keenan is a PPC Account Manager at A2Opinion, a local search marketing agency.