Marg BrightLocal

Initially, I was intrigued by the ability to have someone submit local citations on our behalf, but it was soon proven to be a pipe dream.

During the initial sales process, I noticed that our rep wasn't precisely responsive. That should have been a red flag, but when she offered me a few free credits to explore the CitationBurst campaign, I pressed forward. In very basic terms, I understood that they would need to create dummy accounts for our business in order to do what they needed, but I wasn't expecting them to build those accounts without any consultation. When I expressed concern about how that worked, and asked them not to create any additional dummy accounts without consultation, the overseas call center rep interpreted that request to mean: "Please delete the Google account you created and the Google submission I paid for." And no matter how hard I tried to re-connect with our native-English sales rep or a native-English supervisor overseas, I was unsuccessful. I have spent more time in trying to get BL to restore the ONE Google submission that they deleted than I would have spent in submitting ALL 60 branch updates that I was exploring.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Response from Myles Anderson of BrightLocal

Hi John. Thank you for replying to my email last month and taking the time to share your concerns with my team & I.

I appreciate that you had some frustrations with the service you received from BrightLocal and I apologise for that.

Our mission is to help our customers save time and increase the efficiency of their local SEO optimization. Obviously we didn't do that in your case and we are examining what went wrong to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

A key area of attention is on the communication with customers on the actions that we take. Our processes and understanding are well honed and deliver good results but our communication doesn't always match this. But we will learn from this experience and improve.

Best wishes and thank you again for your time.

Myles

Initially, I was intrigued by the ability to have someone submit local citations on our behalf, but it was soon proven to be a pipe dream.

During the initial sales process, I noticed that our rep wasn't precisely responsive. That should have been a red flag, but when she offered me a few free credits to explore the CitationBurst campaign, I pressed forward. In very basic terms, I understood that they would need to create dummy accounts for our business in order to do what they needed, but I wasn't expecting them to build those accounts without any consultation. When I expressed concern about how that worked, and asked them not to create any additional dummy accounts without consultation, the overseas call center rep interpreted that request to mean: "Please delete the Google account you created and the Google submission I paid for." And no matter how hard I tried to re-connect with our native-English sales rep or a native-English supervisor overseas, I was unsuccessful. I have spent more time in trying to get BL to restore the ONE Google submission that they deleted than I would have spent in submitting ALL 60 branch updates that I was exploring.

Run as far away as possible.

To be honest, I see no business benefits from using BrightLocal.

Response from Myles Anderson of BrightLocal

Hi John. Thank you for replying to my email last month and taking the time to share your concerns with my team & I.

I appreciate that you had some frustrations with the service you received from BrightLocal and I apologise for that.

Our mission is to help our customers save time and increase the efficiency of their local SEO optimization. Obviously we didn't do that in your case and we are examining what went wrong to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

A key area of attention is on the communication with customers on the actions that we take. Our processes and understanding are well honed and deliver good results but our communication doesn't always match this. But we will learn from this experience and improve.

Best wishes and thank you again for your time.

Myles

Quick to answer questions and friendly staff.

I purchased a citation burst campaign, basically paid them to do local business listings. I purchased 12 listings, yet only as of campaign completion, only 3 are live. 5 are existing listings, and 4 are pending approval which I could have done myself. The reason I purchased the listing service was to not have to bother with calls or emails. When I inquired about these issues, I was told that they outsource the work to the Philipines.

Following through on your product to completion.

None that can't be found available freely on your own.

Response from Myles Anderson of BrightLocal

Hi Chad. Thank you for leaving us a review and I'm sorry that you don't feel the experience was what you expected. My team & I have contacted you multiple times to explain that your campaign is still in progress and we are waiting for your listings to be put live by the sites you ordered.

Some sites put listings live immediately while others can take a few days depending on their backlog.

As of today (23rd March you have 8 of 12 listings live.

Of the remaining 4 -

- Bing - requires phone verification which we provided details of to you

- YP.com - requires phone verification which we provided details of to you

- Mapquest - this is done and we're waiting on them to approve the submission now.

- TomTom - they have the data and are ingesting it. They update their records 1 time per quarter and this data is pushed into their mapping products then. Because they're not an 'online directory' we can provide a link to a visible page like we do on other sites. But please be assured that we submit to TomTom correctly for all customers

Regarding your concern about phone verification. We do highlight any sites that need phone verification during the purchase steps - sorry if you didn't see these. We have done all the account creation & submission work; it's just the phone call that you need to trigger which takes 2-3 minutes max.

Regarding 'outsourcing to the Philippines'. Yes we do have a team in the Philippines but they are not outsourced. We have a very experienced and professional team of 85 agents working from our own office in Valencia city. We recruit, train, manage and support this team very closely. We have daily conference calls with them and meet face-to-face twice a year. If you check our about us page you'll see some pictures of our UK team with the Philippines team - https://www.brightlocal.com/about-us/

We also do a lot of work in the local community there to support poorer communities and provide educational support - https://www.brightlocal.com/2018/02/01/brightlocal-celebrates-meaning-christmas-gift-giving/

I hope that I am able to speak with you and answer more of your questions 1 on 1.

Thank you Chad

Myles

Quick to answer questions and friendly staff.

I purchased a citation burst campaign, basically paid them to do local business listings. I purchased 12 listings, yet only as of campaign completion, only 3 are live. 5 are existing listings, and 4 are pending approval which I could have done myself. The reason I purchased the listing service was to not have to bother with calls or emails. When I inquired about these issues, I was told that they outsource the work to the Philipines.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Response from Myles Anderson of BrightLocal

Hi Chad. Thank you for leaving us a review and I'm sorry that you don't feel the experience was what you expected. My team & I have contacted you multiple times to explain that your campaign is still in progress and we are waiting for your listings to be put live by the sites you ordered.

Some sites put listings live immediately while others can take a few days depending on their backlog.

As of today (23rd March) you have 8 of 12 listings live.

Of the remaining 4 -

- Bing - requires phone verification which we provided details of to you

- YP.com - requires phone verification which we provided details of to you

- Mapquest - this is done and we're waiting on them to approve the submission now.

- TomTom - they have the data and are ingesting it. They update their records 1 time per quarter and this data is pushed into their mapping products then. Because they're not an 'online directory' we can provide a link to a visible page like we do on other sites. But please be assured that we submit to TomTom correctly for all customers

Regarding your concern about phone verification. We do highlight any sites that need phone verification during the purchase steps - sorry if you didn't see these. We have done all the account creation & submission work; it's just the phone call that you need to trigger which takes 2-3 minutes max.

Regarding 'outsourcing to the Philippines'. Yes we do have a team in the Philippines but they are not outsourced. We have a very experienced and professional team of 85 agents working from our own office in Valencia city. We recruit, train, manage and support this team very closely. We have daily conference calls with them and meet face-to-face twice a year. If you check our about us page you'll see some pictures of our UK team with the Philippines team - https://www.brightlocal.com/about-us/

We also do a lot of work in the local community there to support poorer communities and provide educational support - https://www.brightlocal.com/2018/02/01/brightlocal-celebrates-meaning-christmas-gift-giving/

I hope that I am able to speak with you and answer more of your questions 1 on 1.

Thank you Chad

Myles

I like the price and the amount of information. Im happy the finally joined the 21st century and integrated Google Analytics.

This was a complete deal breaker for me, when you save reports to PDF they dont ever look like they do on the web page, it takes TONS of editing, when editing is allowed to clean it up. There are misspelled words (American Vs. UK perhaps?) incorrect sentence formatting. There is very little means to edit this information, the tiny customization buttons on the right of the reports your allowed to edit is horrible, you can make things bold but not unbold them, you cant paste tables in or content from other reports as the tables break apart, you can add correct line breaks or better formatting.

I wrote someone at the company about this editing issue, and was bluntly told, "You are not supposed to edit these reports, you are supposed to submit them to your client as they are"., well I will NEVER submit one of Bright Locals reports to a client as is, I am a designer as much as I am a programmer and I find both of these areas completely outdated.

I even came back to give them another try and see they still dont care about customizing the reports, there is just no way I can keep giving them my money, as other places offer TONS of customization.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Response from Myles Anderson of BrightLocal

Hi James 'Roz'

Thanks for your very honest review. Not nice for us to hear but great feedback to validate our product strategy which is now firmly focused on UI update & improving PDFs.

We have tended to focus more on the backend data processing part of our service because data is so important to effective SEO.

But now that we're a bit bigger with more resource we're going to overhaul all of our interfaces - the new location dashboard gives you a sense of the style & real-time direction we're taking.

We hope to have all reports updated, re-styled & with improved PDFs in Q3. I'd have it done tomorrow if we could but we're also extending functionality at same time so it's not just a front-end piece.

Apologies that you got an unsatisfactory reply from our support team. I'll look into that today.

Best wishes & thank you again

Myles