Hi - Myles from BrightLocal here. I saw this thread and wanted to participate to clear up any confusion or concern.
Firstly, sorry to OnlineLobstar if you didn't find our service valuable. We have over 3000 agencies who regularly use our citation building service and get very good feedback on the results and value of it.
Secondly, we're always happy to get feedback, good or bad, because it helps us improve our service. So i would be delighted to jump on a call with OnlineLobstar to discuss concerns; you can reach me at
myles@brightlocal.com and lets talk.
Thirdly, thank you to Eric for championing us and providing such rational answers.
In reply to OnlineLobstar's points -
1. Not enough data fields - we ask customers to provide up to 30 different pieces of data about their business - including full category and service lists, descriptions, 4 images, social links. We actually ask for a lot more data than most other citation building services do. Usually customers complain that we ask for too much and we tell them it's important to have this information on citations.
2. Data not displayed - as Eric mentioned, when you create a free listing on many sites they limit the information you can provide. They charge a significant fee to display other information and we don't believe the added value of this data is worth the cost they charge - often $10-$30/month per site.
3. 'Citations for citation sake' - we're here to serve customers. We let you choose how many sites and which sites you want submission/update on. We never advise customers to do more than they need, although we do advise they do aggregators + manual submissions to most valuable sites. To back this up please look at our recently published Expert Citation guide; it advises a similar strategy and says that doing lots of citations isn't necessary, which chimes with the advice we give customers directly -
Expert Local Citation Survey: How Important Are Local SEO Citations?
4. We're not perfect - building citations does have it's issues and unexpected situations - but which part of SEO isn't?! So i'm the first to say we're not perfect. But we handle 60,000+ every month and have become very adapt at handling most cases. We also have a large support team who are responsive to issues that do arise.
Sorry i've gone on longer than planned. But i wanted to address your main concerns and would be happy to jump on that call to discuss further.
Thanks to you both.
Myles