How I'd grow Yadaphone

Yadaphone is a web app that lets you call any phone number in the world from your browser for a fraction of the cost of a traditional telecom carrier.

There’s nothing to download as it’s a browser-first solution that works on Chrome, Safari and Firefox, with both mobile and desktop browsers supported.

Yadaphone has a huge market advantage by riding the wave of Skype shutting down. Naturally they’d want to do all they can to intercept old Skype customers looking for a new home.

But surprisingly on their site there isn’t a landing page targeting the “Skype alternative” keyword.

Having one could help not only from a traffic perspective (to rank on Google and ChatGPT) but also from a conversion perspective (to reassure old Skype users that with Yadaphone they won’t have a steep learning curve).

Even more importantly considering they already have a separate corporate offer they need to create a “Skype business alternative” page, because company customers are where the real money is.

To be fair if I check the rankings we can see that what's working best is not product landing pages but listicle-type blog posts. Search intent is clear: people want to see a list of alternatives.

But that doesn’t mean having a page like that is useless. On the contrary, it’s super important for being picked up by AI search which rely on clear, structured pages to mention them in their answers.

I have to say that Yadaphone is doing a good job with outreach and has landed a few mentions and links on sites already ranking with those listicle-type blog posts for “Skype alternatives.”

But they’re not appearing in the AI overview yet which is incredibly important because that’s what most people will check out first. To get there it’s important to secure even more placements.

Considering the type of product, one thing that could really boost their traffic would be to translate the site and landing pages into different languages.

It’s easy to forget that less than 10% of the world speaks English as their first language. Having pages to intercept people searching for “Beste Skype-Alternativen” (German) or “Les meilleures alternatives à Skype” (French) could really widen Yadaphone’s potential market.

What’s currently in multiple languages is the blog. Unfortunately it’s not set up correctly.

Having blog posts in different languages within the same folder confuses Google’s language detection and indexing, making it harder to serve the right content to the right audience.

As time passes and users move away from Skype they’ll stop searching for its brand name and start doing more queries to evaluate alternatives.

It’s easy to forecast growing search volume from people looking for information on things like “Google Voice vs. Viber,” etc.

The problem is they don’t search for Yadaphone because they don’t know it exists. What they could do instead is what I like to call “parasite vs. pages.”

Basically they could create a page that explains the different pros and cons of Google Voice vs. Viber but also adds vs. Yadaphone.

Yadaphone has one big competitive advantage compared to its competitors: it’s pay-as-you-go.

I think they should communicate this differentiator more aggressively. The first thing new visitors see should make them immediately understand why this is the tool they should choose.

It could be as simple as adding it to the headline: “Cheap international calls in your browser without committing to a subscription”

Where I think they should spend more time is on the landing page for businesses.

Companies care about a few things that consumers don’t (or at least not as critically.) Things like service security, call quality, support availability etc. But only the latter is briefly mentioned.

Yadaphone should take some time researching and addressing much more in-depth all the specific pain points companies have.

Since most customers probably belong to similar segments with similar needs (e.g. digital nomads, expats, etc.), there might be an opportunity for a referral program.

I’d make it super simple: “If you like Yadaphone and find it useful here are some free credits you can gift to a friend so they can start benefiting from it too”.

One smart addition would be a required field for referrals asking users what segment they identify with.

The survey would be very helpful to identify who the core segments are and to partner with creators whose audiences consist of those same groups.

This is a long-term play because many of them might not need the product right now, but over time it could build a pipeline of new users as that need arises.

The best channel for this might be YouTube as the effect of a promo video wouldn’t stop after it’s posted but it could keep appearing in recommended videos and relevant searches.

Imagine finding a small creator who consistently makes videos about expat life and collaborating with them to make one about the life struggles expats have that no one talks about.

It would be a perfect fit to mention calling home. A few anecdotes about when they had to call their bank in the US and spent $$$ for a quick call. A common pain point most expats have.

The creator could then mention Yadaphone as the product they started using after that bad experience and recommend it to their audience since it never let them down.

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