How a industry-leading agency reduced their annual citation spend by 79% with BrightLocal
“When we were working with the other tool, we had to take a portion of our client's budget every month to be able to afford those services. Now, working with BrightLocal and the one-time fee, we're able to account for that in one month of service and it doesn't really impact the client's budget."
Based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Blue Corona is a digital marketing agency with one goal: to help business owners and marketing executives use technology to measurably improve their marketing performance and ROI. They specialize in helping home service companies, such as HVAC, electricians, and plumbers, to accomplish three main goals:
- Increase their sales
- Reduce their marketing costs
- Differentiate their brand online
Why these goals? CEO, Ben Landers, explains:
“Home services is a highly competitive market and very saturated online. This can make it hard for businesses to stand out on search engine results pages and generate a high volume of qualified leads. We help them do this by tracking their existing advertising activities to see what’s really working for them and what isn’t. We then test new activities, track them, tweak them and repeat.
“In terms of reducing costs, when a lot of prospects come to us they’re working with six different agencies or companies, one for social, one for SEO, one for pay per click and so on, and it’s all very expensive. What we offer them instead is a full-service agency that can handle all of those things for them at a lower cost.”
Expensive citation building
For the team at Blue Corona, being able to provide clients with consistent NAP data has always been important, especially because their clients are local businesses needing to attract local customers. To do this they used a popular citation provider, which for the most part worked well apart from one big issue: cost. Rachel Tinker, SEO Team Lead at Blue Corona, explains:
“Having a citation building tool is a great opportunity for us to get NAP information out there for our clients in bulk. We didn’t have any complaints about our previous citation service. It did what it needed to do. But the price point was very high. So high in fact, that we weren’t consistently able to offer all our client’s citation building services. This, and our goal of reducing marketing costs for our clients, were the reasons we decided to look around to see if there was a cheaper and just as effective alternative.”
Time and money saving services
Rachel and her team needed to migrate 155 locations from their existing citation tool but were naturally concerned about the time it would take and entrusting another service with their client’s information.
Enter BrightLocal.
“We compared quite a few different solutions before choosing BrightLocal,” says Rachel. “The reason we chose them, in the end, was their price and that they offer a Replacement Service which we knew would save us a lot of time.”
Rachel and her colleagues migrated a couple of test locations first to make sure they felt comfortable and confident in the replacement process. The rest was easy:
“The process was seamless. We were able to export all of our client NAP data from the other tool and send it over to the BrightLocal team, who pretty much took care of the rest. It probably took, on average, a month or so to build 4,650 citations. But the fact that we were able to knock out all of the citations for those 155 locations in a month is pretty remarkable when you consider that it would’ve taken our team around 775 hours.”
"We’re now able to offer all of our clients and all of their locations citation services instead of having to pick who can afford them."
Substantial savings of 79% on annual citation costs
Blue Corona saved 79% on their annual citation bill by moving over to BrightLocal’s one-time fee model, and none of their clients saw a slip in rankings as a result of making the switch. Now they only pay for BrightLocal’s local Citation Builder service when new clients come on board or need their citations updated, which costs as little as $2 per citation site.
The savings they’ve made are having a huge impact, allowing them to provide additional SEO services to their clients each month and grow their team.
Rachel says: “When we were working with other tool, we had to take a portion of our client’s budget every month to be able to afford those services. Now, working with BrightLocal and the one-time fee, we’re able to account for that in one month of service and it doesn’t really impact the client’s budget or their ability to receive SEO services from us moving forward. We’re also using the money we save each month to expand our team and help us keep up with our growing client base.”
The impact doesn’t end there...
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