Best Local Search Tool

[Myles Anderson]

Thanks HangTen - appreciate the nice words. If you ever have any questions please just ask me or my team, always happy to help

 

[Myles Anderson]

I spoke with the folks at Yext today. Their service is quite a bit more expensive than Moz or Brightlocal, BUT... there are some really nice advantages to using them.

1. They have a non branded (White Labeled) console, so you can share it with your clients to let them also manage certain listings.
2. The changes you make to citations are updated very quickly via their API connections. With Moz and BrightLocal you might not see new changes in you listings for a while.
3. They have a listing scan tool that you can use on your own website to attract customers.
4. They have something called enhanced content which basically would allow you or your clients to add pertinent content to a listing. Examples might be sales that are happening that week.
5. They are working on a review monitoring tool that would send you review alerts.
6. They have a social post component to allow you to post to multiple social media.

All in all, it sounds like a great service. My take is it is too expensive right now for a single location over moz or bright local, but if you have multiple locations, the price becomes much more affordable and the ability to manage multiple locations becomes a really big time saver.

In reply to point 2. about speed of listings I thought i'd add some specifics to that for BrightLocal -

- Manual submissions - these are done direct-to-site and some of the listings will go live instantly while others may take from a few hours, days or weeks depending on the sites and how effective their editorial team are in reviewing submissions

- Aggregator submissions - actual submission into the aggregators is done immediately. However it takes time for business data to make it's way to directories, review sites, GPS systems & mobile apps. This can be frustrating for business owners and they do need to be patient - the data will filter out eventually & provide the benefit of unified business data online.

Happy to answer any questions you have.

 

[HangTenSEO]

Maybe something is wrong, but I just tried Synup and ran a business search on my company and it said zero match found. Moz Local and Brightlocal both had the correct citation information.

 

[Aarthi]

Hey HangTenSEO,

Thanks for trying out Synup! We tried running a scan for your business and it seems to be working fine now.

If you could message me the address of the business that you were searching for, we'd be able to help you better.

 

[ToddB]

I would have to say be cautious using Bright Local.

I tried them out 2 months ago and it was awful. Gave them one client and they didnt look to remove / delete any bad listings. They just created new. Everywhere.

Their work is handled by a "team" in the Philipines. When I stated to them I could just outsource it there too their response was that they don't outsource it, they have a team there.

Outsource or team the service was awful. I'd avoid them at all costs.

I should note that they did refund me afterwards but i think we can all agree the damage outweighs the refund.

 

[Myles Anderson]

Ouch Todd that's hard to hear!

We do deliver our citations from our team in Philippines. They are our team, recruited, trained & managed by us & working from an office that we control.

I'm sorry to hear that your experience was not good. We have a big commitment to delivering high quality results and we don't get many issues. Those that we do get we take very seriously and do our best to correct & resolve. I talk directly with our team there every day as does our customer success manager so we have our finger firmly on the pulse.

There's a big difference between outsourcing & offshoring. Frankly anyone with a brain & a laptop can build citations. But doing it at scale and maintaining quality requires good systems, training & lots of management. We have 1 manager to 3 submission agents so we heavily resource the management layer so that they check each citation for accuracy & completeness.

So issues are pretty rare, and I'm sorry that your experience wasn't one of the good ones. We let you down and I would enjoy the chance to discuss the issues with you 1 to 1 if you're open to that?

 

[Eric Rohrback]

@Myles - very nice response. Just wanted to point that out because I don't see as many companies responding in such a positive manner when they receive feedback like Todd's.

Like other's have mentioned, every tool has a pro and con. I like Yext because of the level of automation to it. If i need to make an update, the change goes through in a matter of hours, not weeks (or months). Of course it's pay to play, but if there are data issues it's a great first layer. Also makes it really easy to get extra content to a ton of sites all at once. I'll pay the higher price and save my time to do work that will move the needle instead of building citations/worrying about citations. That's my $0.02 though

I haven't tried enough of the others to really give relevant opinions on them.

 

[Tim Colling]

Sorry to say but I had a similarly dissatisfactory experience with BrightLocal's citation building/cleanup a few years back. Never went back, so maybe they're better now and I just don't know it.


Love their reporting tools, though!

 

[Myles Anderson]

Hi Tim. Sorry that you had an experience a few year's ago that put you off. We've made great strides since then to add additional quality checks & automations that greatly reduce (i hesitate to say 'eradicate') the chances of human error.

If you want to try us again then i would be happy to put some free credits in your account - no obligation of course

Glad you like the tools. We just updated our Google Local Wizard tool to incorporate a GMB dupe finder module. And we're about to update ranking report designs & PDFs as step 1 of an overhaul of the usability of that tool.

 

[Myles Anderson]

Thanks Eric - I've learnt, & preached, over the years that being honest, taking responsibility & apologising is the best way to show customers that you care about them & the experience they have.

RE: Yext - i hear all your points about them. They have a good solution; it's not without it's problems but on the whole it works well. I just don't believe that many businesses need the ability to update their data often enough to justify paying a monthly fee from now until eternity.

I did put together a detailed & non-partisan review of different listing/citation services here - https://www.brightlocal.com/2016/11/02/moz-local-vs-yext-vs-brightlocal-vs-whitespark/

Hopefully this is useful to readers on this thread.

And merry christmas folks

 

[JoshuaMackens]

RE: Yext - i hear all your points about them. They have a good solution; it's not without it's problems but on the whole it works well. I just don't believe that many businesses need the ability to update their data often enough to justify paying a monthly fee from now until eternity.

Very true.

 

[HRobinson]

I manage nonprofits with typically over 14 locations.

I don't find your pricing easy to understand for multiple locations.


I see that you have unlimited max presences but minimal per social media such as Google My Business. It appears in your pricing a model for 5 +3 presences as you call them.

While I find posting tools reasonable in pricing. Your tool, like many other similar tools, are overpriced for us than the benefit we gain from using them.

 

[liriotherapy]

Hi I found moz local very good, I will try bright local too see whats happen
thanks

 

[Shane Pollard]

Nice share Paul G. Very helpful tool.

 

[vivekrpatel]

Hello friends,


I know this thread is a bit old, but it's still relevant for citation management tools.


I've created a poll asking people about their favorite tools.

https://twitter.com/vivekrpatel/status/912923555225944064


It would be nice to get your thoughts on this survey. If I get the anticipated response, then I'd like to add your tweet in the post, which we're going to create in the near future.


Sincerely,
Vivek

 

[HRobinson]

Vivek,

Report back with the results.

 

[vivekrpatel]

Sure.

 

[Local_SEOer]

BrightLocal is my favorite so far.

 

[vivekrpatel]

The poll has been ended but you can still share your favorite tool in the comment.

 

[RiverG]

Out of your list of tools, I currently use Yext for a company with 75 locations and Localeze and manual entry for a client with over 500 locations. These two tools are definitely two ends of the spectrum. If you need reporting, instant fix for your listings (and to know where your info is going), have a large budget, and want to use a tool that you can post to social media from, I would use Yext. I do think you can use multiple tools for a cheaper price to get everything that you can get from Yext.

For me, there really isn't a huge benefit for using Localeze alone since you really do not know where your information is going and the product is not very innovative.

Most recently, I really like Advice Local after seeing a demo. It has a Visibility report that you can run for potential customers or use it as a benchmark to measure where your client was before you implemented their local strategy. You also get 4 different aggregators (similar to Moz Local), there is a review monitoring tool, keyword tool and automated reporting. The price is also pretty reasonable for resellers. I have also been impressed by BrightLocal which is not too different from this platform.

I would highly recommend checking out DBA Platform if you are doing anything manual. They can automate optimization, citations, and give you free white-labelled monthly reporting.