BrightLocal vs. Google Business Profile

I recently broke away from corporation gyms and decided to start my own personal training business in Plano, TX. Looking to expand my visibility in order to bring in new clients, I signed up for BrightLocal after taking a Udemy class on optimizing my Google Business Page. I have not even had BrightLocal for a week and I have already seen a tripling increase in views on my Google Business Page and an increase in the number of people who have reached out to me. I signed up for the citation builder campaign and the campaign isn't even finished. BrightLocal also set me up with a customer service executive named Becki who was absolutely lovely! She gave me lots of things to think about and action steps to take to further expand the reach of my business. I haven't even been with BrightLocal for a month and I'm already so grateful for them! I highly recommend them and their services to help you grow your business!

The great advantage of Google My Business is that any business that complies with the privacy and authentication policy requirements can access all the functionality tools that help promote the business website through the referral system, exchange of opinions with other users and search engine optimization (SEO).

Incentivized

• When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
• I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
• BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.

Incentivized

• I appreciate how you can select your amenities and customize your profile to stand out in a unique manner
• it's super easy to add new products / post updates about your business
• The use of pictures is helpful for our customers, we're at the end of a industrial park and it can be tricky to find the front of our office at times. Customers have mentioned our business profile pictures helped them locate us!

Incentivized

• BrightLocal can very difficult to communicate with, especially when it comes to reporting bugs / defects, and also when it comes to finding out whether they are working on those bugs.
• BrightLocal's reports, other then the ranking reports, have far too many bugs and they seem to either have little QA or poor QA practices, considering how many defects there are.

Incentivized

• Sometimes it's difficult to verify a business if they are an online business and have no brick and mortar location.
• I wish there was more control of how the reviews are sorted and a faster ability to dispute completely spammy reviews.
• It would be helpful to have more captions in the photos, especially for restaurants because people post food photos without any descriptions and it's difficult to figure out what certain photos represent at times.

Incentivized

Google Business Profile is very user friendly for the users and well as the customers of the company. The customers have an easy time finding the information they need and posting and viewing reviews

Incentivized

Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.

Incentivized

Whether it is technical or customer support, Google My Business excels and suffers in the exact same ways that all other branches of Google do. While you'll eventually figure out the issue, the sheer magnitude of the company comes with expected hurdles, wait times, and support you'd come to expect from other large companies.

Incentivized

We used to use RavenTools but left several years ago as we needed a software platform more geared towards Local SEO, which is exactly what BrightLocal specializes in. Both of these have multiple features and great reporting options, but in the end, BrightLocal offered more features for Local SEO and also offered better reporting for clients as the reports were very easy to read and understand.

Incentivized

Before using Google My Business, we have used the "Yext" platform in our company to improve our positioning and get our clients to have an exact location of our company, however, the results were very bad. Yext user support did not offer us good care when we purchased the annual plan. When we made the purchase, we had several doubts to be able to implement this platform in our company, since the configuration of the location and the statistical analysis of search is somewhat complicated, but the Yext user support responded after 48 hours, and This did not allow us to quickly implement this software in our company, so we went to make a refund. Google My Business solved all our doubts, each one of the problems presented during the implementation of Google My Business in my company, were solved in just a few minutes since we received help from an online agent 24 hours a day. The implementation of this software was totally fast thanks to the excellent support we received.

Incentivized

• Positive because it makes our local clients happy and want to renew with us.
• Positive for the price. I didn't manage the budget, but we were always happy to have the service so I know we were getting value from it.
• Positive to see local rankings up

Incentivized

• Provides social proof of real users experiences.
• Is often the only information a visitor needs to visit your location providing a zero click search with no need to visit a website.
• Ensures users can see an unbiased snapshot of a business.

Incentivized