Touch Local: feedback
Feedback: what stops me completing my Touch Local listing
I got an email from Touch Local this morning saying that if I completed my profile, I stood a chance of winning £2000 cash.
The on-site copy reminds you that the more detailed information you provide about your business, the more chance you stand of creating confidence in prospects. A quick glance showed my profile is a depressing 11% complete.
The kind of information required to complete your profile is on one level perfectly logical. On another level though, it’s a complete turn off.
I suddenly found myself faced with what could be an hour’s work to complete a profile on a promise of benefits about which I’m already dubious - to provide the kind of information that I’ve already spent a great deal of time and effort compiling here on our site.
A listing that requires a lot of effort is off-putting particularly when the benefits are moot, to say the least. One that requires all that effort AND duplicates what we’ve already spent time and energy on feels even more off-putting. Annoying even.
I just found myself making a snap judgment: can I be bothered to invest any more effort?
The answer was no.
Furthermore, Touch Local’s performance in the common-sense Deek-o-matic™ online directory test is pretty poor. Not only was the first Touch Local result halfway down page 4 of Google natural results, the page that the your business would be listed on is plastered with Google Ads - for your competitors!
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2 Responses to “Touch Local: feedback”
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Hi from Touch Local!
Always good to get feedback from blogs and other forums.
Just a couple of points I’d like to share with anyone reading this:
Content is king! The more information you’re able to put on our site about your company, the better indexed you’ll be and the more traffic you’ll get. What we offer is a way to get that content onto the internet with minimal effort and in a way that will attract new clients to you.
But I appreciate that those open questions such as “What differentiates you from your competitors?” are quite daunting. We are working on developing more specific questions that are based on the category your business is in - that should make it easier to complete our forms.
For customers who buy one of our LeadFinder products, we also help promote their businesses by improving the SEO further and buying PPC ads.
As for the Google ads, please remember that your free listing is - err - free. And we’ve got to make a living! We don’t put these on the pages of paying customers, though.
Nick, thanks for your response.
You’re right, content is king and Touch Local IS a way to get that content out there. Appreciate your distinction about ads only being on ‘free’ listings. I can see paid listings coming up under ’sponsored’ ads (PPC) and the click through goes straight to their listing without Google Ads.
One of the biggest mistakes we all make at some point is to assume that what we think are benefits actually are benefits in the minds of our prospects.
I’ve seen this time and time again in respect of directories offering a ‘free listing’. There’s a danger that what you think of as ‘free’ a) is incentive enough for me to give up time and personal data and b) buys you out from having to take seriously feedback to the contrary.
If you feel you need to generate revenue by putting competitor ads next to free listings, that’s your choice - but your argument about making a living doesn’t change the fact that those ads are still effectively a disincentive to someone putting the effort in to post a ‘free’ listing.
Telling me that it’s ‘err - free’ gives the impression that you think ‘free’ should be motivation enough and that I, the customer, am being stooopid by suggesting otherwise.
It isn’t for me - which was my original feedback. I hope that’s useful - and thanks again for entering into the conversation.