Posted on May 27, 2014

Yahoo Free Basic Business Listings – Support No Longer Offered

Earlier this month Yahoo announced the following:

“Important update: Assisted support is no longer offered for Local Basic clients. If you are a Local Basic client, please visit the help pages for support. If you are a Local Basic client, and your listing has been pending editorial review for more than 30 days, you can inquire about your listing status using the Local Listings Help Form…”

This is a very important decision for most small businesses and comes on the heels of Yahoo announcing its partnership with Yelp. This partnership allows Yelp to push reviews and pictures into the Business Profiles Yahoo allows small businesses to create within their search engine. While Yahoo has the smallest market share of search of the big three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo, respectively) they still have a very loyal base of consumers and hence, shouldn’t be disconnected as irrelevant.

For this reason Glacial has always made building and/or claiming business profiles in Yahoo part of its initial set up package for Local Search. Yahoo has also been the most notoriously difficult to work with and have the profiles go live with accurate information. This announcement complicates matters even further.

Essentially what Yahoo is saying is that if you have an issue with the free listings we provide for you – too bad, pay us and we’ll pay attention. Now if there is never an issue there would never be a reason to upgrade your profile to a paid listing. Sadly with Yahoo, there is ALWAYS going to be an issue. Previously I could fix it myself, and when I couldn’t and had to work with Yahoo directly, I was able to resolve the issue over time. Now I cannot even do the most basic of fixes, nor can I reach and have Yahoo assist me.

What this means for you, our clients and potential clients, is that when an issue crops up with your free Yahoo profile we will need to have a discussion on whether or not you wish to pay an additional monthly free to keep your Yahoo Business Profiles live and accurate. The lowest cost currently available is $10 per month per profile. Meaning that if you are a three location practice and only wish profiles for the practice locations your cost would be $30 a month. If you wish to include doctor profiles each would be an additional $10. While this cost is definitely on the lower side of what companies charge for enhanced listings, you can see how these costs can quickly add up.