Nearby Now: Heat Maps & Reviews. Does anyone use this?

[Former Member]

Does anyone use this product? It seems like it would be a great local tool to help with ranking and improving a local site.

For a service business, workers can "check-in" using an app, take photos of their current job, and request reviews from customers. All the data is recorded and show on a service area heat map, photo gallery, and review map.

Anyone have any experience with it?

ServicePros ?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for sharing Ross!

Only had time for quick peek but looks interesting.

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

That does look like a sweet tool/service for service contractors. Thanks for sharing!

Travis

 

[Former Member]

Seems like no here has tried. Looks like I'll have to be the guinea pig and report back in a few months

 

[tarpontim]

I know of someone who uses it and likes it so far. He owns a irrigation company and has his service techs check in each time they do a service call. Each check in is Geo stamped so it will show correctly on a map. They can also ask the homeowner if they would like to leave a review. All they have to do is ask for their cell number and send them a text from the app. The homeowner gets a text in seconds and completes the review in 1 minute.
He currently has 150+ reviews in the past 2 months. They are all real. However they are not posted to Google +!
It is definitely helping with their local rankings but I feel they can do even better but they are happy.
Nearby now offers this to agencies for $100 per month and they sell it to the end user for $300 per month. It is a little on the pricy side for most businesses but worth the money for larger businesses that will actually use it.
Tim

 

[Former Member]

Thanks for the info! I love the who concept. I do know the company has been around for years, but it's seems their growth has been slow to stagnant. I think their pricing has been holding them back a bit. It's amazing how many reviews you can collect. I wonder if you can link your requests you send to clients to your google+ account, superpages etc.

 

[tarpontim]

google "Birmingham AL - HVAC" and you will see Freedom HVAC come up. They are using Nearby Now. The reviews and check ins look great on the town landing pages.

 

[FAME]

Does anyone use this product? It seems like it would be a great local tool to help with ranking and improving a local site.

For a service business, workers can "check-in" using an app, take photos of their current job, and request reviews from customers. All the data is recorded and show on a service area heat map, photo gallery, and review map.

Anyone have any experience with it?

ServicePros ?

We have recently setup Nearby Now on several sites. I am re-indexing pages and running ranking reports and can report back with those results.
We have also used it on our site here if you would like to see how we implemented it for local SEO.
Douglasville GA Web Design Projects | Atlanta Web Design CompanyI'm happy to answer any questions I can about implementation, experience or even how to get technicians to actually check in

Ask away!

 

[Conor Treacy]

We had a plumbing company using this app and they loved it. We no longer assist them on SEO, and it looks like they've redesigned their site and removed the tool from their site. I know it was a nice novelty item for them for a couple of months, but I don't know if they used it to the fullest extent of what could be done.

I do like what you've done with it on FAME and it seems like an interesting approach.

We have a roofing company that is looking to build a map with pins on places that they've performed work - this may be a tool that can accomplish that (if it allows him to enter locations of previous jobs, even though he may not have a testimonial on the job). I have to do looking on that project, but this may be a tool for that job too.

 

[FAME]

Conner,
I'm always happy to talk shop. Feel free to give me a buzz and I can give you a few of our experiences.


It seems to me the real tipping point, or the lynch pin, will be on how well the management can motivate the field reps to checkin and use good keywords.


As much as we hate to admit it, good SEO often comes down to people

 

[FAME]

I do like what you've done with it on FAME and it seems like an interesting approach.

We have a roofing company that is looking to build a map with pins on places that they've performed work - this may be a tool that can accomplish that (if it allows him to enter locations of previous jobs, even though he may not have a testimonial on the job). I have to do looking on that project, but this may be a tool for that job too.

Conor,

Just saw this part of your question.

Yes, you can go in the management interface and add pins from jobs that were not checked into by the on-site rep. You could use that to add previous jobs.

 

[JCL Marketing]

I've been using it for a few months for a few clients and the ones that buy in to the system (consistent check-ins and review requests) see great results in terms of geo-targeted landing pages ranking quickly. It really seems like a no-brainer for any service area business that wants to rank in towns outside of their hometown.

They have a very nice reseller setup and the backend might be even nicer than the product, which might be one of the best local search products I've seen.

I'm not an expert by any means but more than willing to answer any questions I can.

 

[CianC]

Hi All -

Thank you very much for this discussion about Nearby Now. As John pointed out, you can use our mobile apps to create local content and secure local reviews from the field, and you can also use our admin portal to create that content from your central office and assign the locations manually.

That rich local content and social proof will feed back to city-specific pages on your own website (or your clients' websites), and you will see strong local organic marketing benefits.

Service area businesses see great benefits, of course, but also any other business that is seeking to rank locally in cities that go beyond their home city.

Feel free to reach out to me, also, if have any questions for your own local business, or for agencies?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for dropping by Cian. Apps like this are starting to be a hot topic around here.
And this one in particular looks very exciting!

 

[Chris_Gregory]

We've used it for a local client. It works just like you think it works but there is no guarantee that google will show your review snippets. We found the best signal was to create a city page for each service. Then as the techs used the service unique content would automatically appear on those city pages. The content usually includes service address which is a strong local signal.

The biggest issue is getting the client to really buy in. It's only as good as the techs using it which is always the problem.

-Chris

 

[markwaldin]

this looks a lot like an advertisement. what are you saying about heat maps??? I can tell you Customer Lobby is probably one of the better small business tools out there for a company that has trouble with follow through on getting reviews from customers.

 

[Laustin1878]

This definitely looks like a nice tool and bridges a few big gaps in getting reviews. Looking at some of the samples provided and hearing that some of you are creating a landing page for each city/service offered, how are you guys managing to keep the content fresh across a dozen plus cities? Services I can see them being different, but isn't this creating thin, or dupe content?

The freedom site has a landing page for several cities served but on numerous pages, there are 3 lines of text which is the same across each page. The only difference is the map and reviews. Just curious how this is working out as a true landing page (showing in SERPs) b/c I have a client who has very little local content and I didn't want to build thin pages, regurgitating the same services. For the locale, there are A LOT of different cities and I remember a discussion here where people advised against it.

 

[willieaames]

Good tool but $99 ?

 

[JCL Marketing]

We use it with a 8-10 accounts and everyone is really happy with it. As long as the company works the system it's a no-brainer worthwhile investment, even underpriced.