Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Semrush
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Semrush is a relatively popular search engine optimization tool set from the company of the same name based in Pennsylvania and founded in 2008. Largely the platforms relies on competitive intelligence, and features SEO staples like backlink checking, keyword analysis to refine SEO and PPC campaigning and locate low-cost / high-yield keywords, analysis of competitors who co-occupy desired ad and listing spaces, domain vs. domain analysis, as well as site audit and domain tracking.
Semrush can…
Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
This is suited to plan for keywords in a single market, but it struggles when you need to consolidate several markets. It is well-suited to discover new keywords directly related to the ones being used currently to expand the content the company is creating to get better results.
Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
SEMRush has a slight learning curve, but everything is organized really well. Once you learn where everything is, using the software and running reports is incredibly easy. You can easily add new projects, get help for improving on-page SEO, and there are even video tutorials that walk you through the whole system if you still feel uncomfortable with it.
I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
I'm in a FB group for Semrush paid users and it amazing! They are fast to respond, take suggestions and help with questions. I have not felt alone in using this product at all. Highly recommend their support team. When I had an issue I can jump into the group and they will help get me the right person to help or even tag their programmers to look at something that is going on. Love the group!
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
We have used both Ahrefs and Semrush extensively at our agency and Semrush remains the tool of choice. We find that Semrush has the largest selection of tools & features to use, with the highest accuracy, and provides top-tier analysis recommendations. It's really is the ultimate all-in-one tool when comparing other performance measurement tools in the digital marketing space.
Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
Using Semrush on behalf of our clients, we have seen some impressive growth in organic visibility, traffic, conversion and revenue, across multiple industries.
The site checks available with Semrush have helped us to pitch and sell our services, securing new clients.
