Most business owners will have come across a marketing firm called Hibu, at Total SEO we often hear stories about the results they achieve for their clients, and their sales agents using pushy tactics to try and get businesses to sign up with them.

Hibu is the digital arm of the Yellow Pages, in 2012 Yell decided to change their online brand name to Hibu after their CEO labelled the Yell brand a “a dinosaur”.

We understand that the idea of changing the name from Yell to Hibu was to attract a younger audience, we also understand that the word “Hibu” has no meaning whatsoever and when challenged about this at the launch of the Hibu brand in 2012, the then Yell CEO, Mike Pocock said “neither did Google” – of course, this isn’t the case, Google comes from the word Googol which is a number 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

So, Hibu got off on the wrong foot with a brand name with no meaning, and things don’t seem to have gone well in the two years since they launched, as Yell have now decided to drop the brand name altogether and revert back to the original name of Yell, this really does look like a company who don’t know whether they are coming, or going.

One of the major problems with Yell and Hibu is that they have a one size fits all approach to digital marketing, they give everyone a very basic website, often just a page or two built on the Moonfruit platform and then seem to hope for the best in terms of how the “site” ranks in Google.

I have spoken to past clients of theirs, who get promised the earth at the sales stage, only to be passed on to an account manager who has no idea what the sales rep promised, and worse, has no ability to deliver what the client believed they would be getting.

The best method for getting business websites onto page one of Google is to adopt a strategy that is specific to the website and the industry being targeted.

As a minimum, this should involve all of the following (and a whole lot more besides):

Keyword research to ensure the correct phrases are being targeted
Competitor analysis
Rewrite on-site page titles and descriptions (meta data)
Review and rewrite on-site content
Adopt a strategy for creating new content on-site
Robots.txt audit
www resolve audit
Creation of a Google friendly sitemap
Website speed testing
Duplicate content analysis
Hosting audit
Backlink strategy and profiling
Social media recommendations

This is just a summary of some areas of the work that will get a website starting to move up the search rankings, it varies from site to site, and a successful SEO campaign should always be created on a site by site basis, there is no one size fits all strategy.

So, who knows what Yell will offer the digital marketplace now they have changed back to the “dinosaur” name, from reading reviews and speaking to their past clients I would urge anyone with a business website to look at all available options and compare what they are getting for their money.

What I also know, is that any business owner who wants to be on page one of Google should speak to us at Total SEO & Marketing, or, get a free review of their website to find out the good and bad as seen by Google, to do this, simply complete the review request at the top of this page.