Blue Corona Case Study

How an industry-leading agency reduced their annual citation spend by 79% with BrightLocal

Blue Corona provide digital marketing services for home service companies

About Blue Corona

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.”

To help their clients reach these goals, they offer three core services: web design/development, SEO, and pay per click. They also pride themselves on their use of tracking and data.

“No other home service marketing agency takes it to the level we do with data,” Ben says. “We gather as much accurate data and information as we can to help us learn what’s working and what’s not for each individual client, so we can build marketing strategies that deliver results.”

“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 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.”

Rachel Tinker, SEO Team Lead, Blue Corona

The Challenge

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.”

The Solution

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.”

BrightLocal Tools Used

Citation Builder

Local citation building and data aggregator submissions.

Find out more

The Results

Substantial Savings

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 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.

“Because the cost is significantly less using BrightLocal and the overall maintenance is almost non-existent,” Rachel continues, “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. Since completing the initial migration, we’ve built citations through BrightLocal for a further 275 locations. Citations and a consistent online presence is something that is central to SEO and being able to offer that to everyone now means that we can deliver well-rounded SEO work.

“With the other tool, everything was very much on their terms. However, with BrightLocal, the fact that we are continually able to provide consistent name, address, phone number information to our clients, can practically handpick the citations that we want, and can access the login information so we can make updates to clients’ citations ourselves, is a real differentiator and gives us greater autonomy and more control. I can’t recommend BrightLocal enough.”