Advice Local Directory Listing Service - Suggestions or Advice

[sarmcl]

I know this thread is a couple months old...but I thought sharing my experience might help someone coming across this...

Something strange has been going on at Advice Local the past 18 months or so...We had over a hundred of our clients in their system. Their system simply wasn't working. They didn't do what we were paying them to do - claim/maintain listings in on their network of partner sites. Their support was non existent. We'd call and call our rep, and she was always not working that day or something...we'd leave messages, never got call backs.

It's like they didn't want our business...because the weird thing was that they stopped charging us, too.

Background: We started doing it all manually ourselves - about 50 or so directories -one at at time-for every single client. Then we went with Moz about 3-4 years ago, and kind of found out it wasn't a very robust solution at all...they hit the major ones of course, but only a couple directories and aggregators. That's when we found Advice Local - everything seemed to go pretty well the first year or so then their s#!t fell off the cliff.

We USED to have them as a vendor and lets just say--it was challenging 24/7 and they are no longer a vendor . THey outsource ALOT of things.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Just had a walkthrough call with one of their agents for a demo of the software. I guess a few years ago we used their widget tool as we were looking to put a widget on our site as a lead gen (we opted not to move forward with this kind of method).

We are a Yext partner and use Brightlocal also. Certainly things that each of those platforms do that AdviceLocal does not have in their toolset.

The big thing going for AdviceLocal is that if you cancel with them, they do not revert your listings (unlike Yext). That said, they don't offer 1 time service, which is odd as there's nothing really stopping someone from signing up, getting everything in check, then cancel. It's cheating, but there's nothing inherent stopping that.

Pricing as disclosed earlier runs $249/month which includes 10 client locations, then $25 for each additional. Once you hit 75 listings, you're moved off to bulk sales and pricing decreases (I didn't inquire on that pricing).

Overall, their new dashboard looks great.

With Yext, the ability to post coupon/special alerts and they highlight on directory listings is nice. Also adding Menu or Services is possible and can be updated whenever. To accomplish the menu or services listing you'd need to push through Judy's Book (Advice Local owned), but that's about it.

It's a great "startup" solution when claiming different profiles etc, but I'm a control freak too and like to know I can access things when I need to.

I have not yet decided if I will be pursuing Advise Local for some of our clients listings.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Many services have offered that they don't revert listings but in the end they do. No clue if Advice Local really does or not.

As you said, what's to keep you from signing up and then stopping? That would be my major question.

Also, does it really work? There are many stories of these type of services not doing what they're supposed to do, unlike Yext (and sometimes even Yext). Are these stories true? No idea.