Google has made it official– mobile devices are now beating desktop searches in ten countries including the United States and Japan. And this is is probably the reason that the “Mobilegeddon” search algorithm changes were timed to roll out just a couple of weeks back, on April 21st.
When you consider that Google’s mobile search numbers DON’T include tablets, the small device searches proportions are probably even higher than the official numbers reflect. This means that there are hundreds of thousands of websites across the internet that are now critically in need of technical help getting mobile friendly if they hope to compete on the web.
But if you are a local consultant, you probably don’t want to spend your time randomly checking websites, running tests, tracking down contact information, creating and formatting reports and presentations manually to get those clients on board, instead of spending your time performing the needed services and getting paid.
If that sounds like your dilemma, you’ll want to check out my detailed review of the local biz prospecting system, Cloud Prospector Machine.
Click here to get Cloud Prospector Machine
Use Coupon Code: 20pcoff
Get 20% off during the first 3 hours 24 Hours of launch
(Coupon Extended till 5/8/2015 @12noon EST)
Who is Cloud Prospector Machine For?
If you are working with clients doing SEO, Video Marketing, Mobile Websites, Page Speed Optimization, Google Business, Yelp, Facebook, and other local biz marketing services then this type of lead prospecting service is something you’ll want to have in your toolbelt, so you can spend less of your time looking for clients, and more of your time working for them and pulling in fees for services rendered.
If you are a regular online business owner, and you don’t plan on doing any side work for other business owners, then this tool is probably overkill– sure, you could use it one time on your own websites to evaluate your web presence– but your mileage for the money would be much less than the consultant would get from it.
Best Features of Cloud Prospector Machine
Cloud Prospector Machine has an impressive feature set. Overall, after spending some time with the application, I was hard pressed to find much to criticize in the way it is built, features, or usability. (As I’m a usability freak, that’s sort of unusual for me to be so happy with the way an application is arranged.)
Here are some of the features I liked most:
- Fast Discovery of Websites with Mobile-Friendliness Problems – Just enter a keyword and city, and get back a report showing where the opportunities are.
- Automatic Fetching of Contact Information If Available – Fetches email addresses from the WHOIS records of the site.
- Fairly good feedback on progress of the search – Important since the amount of data being fetched is large. It’s nice to have decent feedback so you never have to wonder if it just stopped working.
- Saves Your Prospects For Later – You never need to re-do a previous client search to work on it some more since the searches and results are saved in a list inside your dashboard
- Bulk Generation of Website Audit Reports to Help You Sell Your Services – One of the hardest things for new consultants to do is to SELL the services they offer. So having a pre-formatted report containing the client’s custom data to work from, makes it dead easy to show the client how their website is hurting them.
- Storage of Multiple Response Templates – If you work in different niches and you want to tailor your reports to those niches, you’ll love the ability to store a “Profile” as a template and use it to fill in your Website Audit Reports for sending with a couple of clicks.
- International Ready – Search Inside Different Countries for potential clients.
- Mobile-readiness reports – See not only whether the website passed or not, but if they fail, what problems caused it to fail, and how the website actually looks to a mobile device.
Easy Mobile Site Builder – If you don’t have a mobile website builder, no worries, you can build mobile sites right inside Cloud Prospector Machine.(Note: The Mobile Site Builder has been pulled from the basic package as of launch and after I first published my review, but you can still get it in one of the upsells. )- Site Auditor – This is HUGE, and worthy of being a product all by itself for the money. You get a full, detailed, top to bottom report on the website including SEO & keywords rankings, Page Speed, Mobile Friendliness, Local Visibility, Social Media visibility, Majestic SEO metrics and a whole bunch more. (Note: The Site Auditor is available only in the top level package of Cloud Prospector Machine.)
What’s Not So Hot About Cloud Prospector Machine
I confess, unlike the last product I reviewed, there really isn’t a lot to complain about here. Cloud Prospector Machine is a SaaS product, so it’s all hosted on the web and you never have to install anything.
The user dashboard is fairly sensible in it’s layout, the icons are clear, and there is decent feedback to the user while searches are being conducted. I also found most features had names that made sense, so it wasn’t necessary to guess about what each feature was going to do.
If there was one thing I might complain about, it’s that the fonts in some places are a bit small, and sometimes a little too soft grey to be as easy to read as I like. (This is such a small thing I wouldn’t even mention it, except there was nothing else to mention.)
Conclusion
Cloud Prospect Machine is a great tool for local biz consultants like you who want to expand your client list while the Mobile-friendliness update can help you drive more sales with the very real problem of sinking rankings for sites that aren’t mobile-friendly yet.
Currently the pricing on Cloud Prospector Machine is a one time fee, instead of a subscription like you might expect with SaaS, which only adds to the value being offered here. I think you’ll agree, it should probably be in your lead-gen toolkit.
My Overall Rating: 4.5 Stars – ★★★★☆
Click here to get Cloud Prospector Machine
Use Coupon Code: 20pcoff
Get 20% off during the first 3 hours 24 Hours of launch
(Coupon Extended till 5/8/2015 @12noon EST)
You wrote “International Ready – Search Inside Different Countries for potential clients.”
but please can you confirm that I can use it for France ?
I am really interested but if all (messages, audit prospector, etc…) are in english, it will be useless for french people.
Can you test it and send me any answer about this ? If ok, for sure, I will buy your recommendation !
regards
Bernard
Hi Bernard, I checked the options inside the dashboard and I didn’t see any options to translate the report attachments. I asked Steve and he indicates that is not in there, though you can certainly send the emails in whatever language you like– the preformatted reports are in English. I’ve mentioned it to the Cloud Prospector team that this might be a great feature to add for the future though. Thanks for pointing out a potential improvement.
I tried to contact them and I am a bit dubious about this deal because all the support link from the web page are redirecting nowhere !
Looks like the link is just not properly formatted. Looks like they use FreshDesk like I do, so their support link should be https://cpmachine.freshdesk.com/
I have let Steve know about the problem with the support link so it should be fixed shortly.
FYI, they have extended the coupon code to be valid for 24 hours because apparently, when the cart opened PayPal freaked out on the initial sales volume. They have that settled now, but wanted to make sure no one missed the early bird price because of PayPal’s little panic attack. 🙂
Just an FYI, Brett Rutecky did not approve this software after extensive testing. Some real shortcomings in both the concept & execution that he experienced.
Brett is entitled to his opinion like everyone else. Most of his comments seem to center around things he could not see, where I did my review based on what I could see.
For example, he dinged on himself not having a mandrill account… obviously someone who was going to use the mandril email option would have one. There is also a pop3/smtp option, which is a lot easier to come by, as most of us running business websites have access to one, or could use SES or Sendgrid.
The mobile builder issue has since become a moot point, since as noted in the comments, the feature was moved out of the basic package and into one of the upsells. I still think all of the data it compiles for you, and the other feautures is worth the price.
Hi Lisa,
I saw your review of this product and commend you for the excellent review.
I noticed that you mentioned that the ” site auditor ” feature was offered as part of the front end. I took a screen shot of the the sales page earlier which showed the highest level option ($97) not mentioning the “site auditor”. When I came back to the offer later the $97 option mentioned the “site auditor”! Initially the only difference between the $67 and $97 options was the number of professional licenses . Could you please clarify.
Thanks
Yes, you are correct favion that the Site Auditor was moved to an upsell after I had completed my review.
With product launches, often the sales funnel will end up being changed at the last minute, which isn’t always communicated where someone like me can find that out.
I do my best to ask what’s included when I see a big dashboard like this with many features, but it looks like they changed the offer. My humble apologies for not catching the change.
Thanks for the review… certainly a useful program.
My only comment on the review is that there is not much comment on the actual website building portion of the program… It is fine to gather the information and be able to present it to our clients, but if we are going to offer to “build ” an new site or make their current site more mobile responsive, then surely the attributes, function and ease of use of this feature needs to be fleshed out. How easy is it to build someone a site for instance…. or should one be using another unrelated building tool ?
I note also that Australia and New Zealand didn’t seem to be on the list for countries that are supported in the search function… Could you clarify that please… seems that we are so often excluded from many a cool tool !!!
Thanks
Tony
Sure Tony, thanks for swinging by to check out the review. About the mobile builder– two things
1. I have asked several times but have not been able to get access to it. The JV Account they let me use did not have access to that turned on, so I was unable to test it. I still think the rest of the application is highly useful on it’s own however.
2. At the time I did my review, Steve had told me that the mobile builder was included, but apparently Todd who does the development decided he couldn’t offer that as part of the base package and it was pulled. So it is now part of one of the upsells.
Really wish I could have tested it!
On the countries available, I’ve double checked and you are correct, Google.co.nz and Google.com.au are not on the list. Having done some work in my own apps with different google domains, I think this would not be hard to add if someone “reminded” the cloud prospector team they forgot something.