BrightLocal vs. ReputationStacker

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!

It's amazing for getting new Google reviews, responding to reviews, and tracking reviews. It also makes it easy for us to follow up with our clients, helping us manage expectations and resolve issues. It's not a full customer support system (and it doesn't try to be).

• 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

• Online reputation management for multiple locations of our business
• Review generation for all of our clinics (with a focus on Google reviews)
• Responding to reviews at scale
• Review and reputation reporting

• 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

• Adding additional locations of our business wasn't obvious at first, but when I figured out how to do it it was easy after that.

It takes a few minutes to set up and then it is automatic. It literally takes care of everything you need it to do on its own. You can also work with it a little more if you want to assign reviews to other users to follow up with patients (for example), but overall it is extremely easy to use.

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

I had a question about how to add new locations and the support team got back to me immediately and showed me how to do it.

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

Podium is great if you use all of its features. But it takes a long time to learn and if you don't use ALL of its features then it's very expensive for what it is. We really just wanted a dedicated focused reputation/review management system, so when our Podium contract ended we switched over to ReputationStacker and it's perfect for what we need.

• 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

• We have an average of over 30% more clicks on our Google Business Profiles since we started using ReputationStacker (because we now show a lot higher in Google's local search pack).