HighLevel, also known as GoHighLevel, is currently one of the hottest sales and marketing apps in the business world. Many business owners and agencies see the platform as a game-changer. With over a million unique visitors per month, a pretty high visit duration time, and a very low bounce rate compared even to industry giants like HubSpot, it looks like the company is well on its way to success and a very bright future.
Considering all these things, it’s only natural to be curious about HighLevel. If you are among the many business owners who are wondering what HighLevel can do for their business, we’ll provide you with some answers.
The Name
An interesting thing about the name of this platform is how it got to be called GoHighLevel. This was not the original idea. Rather, the company was and actually still is just HighLevel. Its mission is to help you elevate your business to a “high level.” However, when it tried to register the domain name HighLevel, it couldn’t, so it decided to take GoHighLevel instead, which is how many of us refer to it today.
In this article, we’ll use HighLevel, as this is the name of the company. Additionally, we’ll use the abbreviation HL when we’re using the platform’s name more than once.
Is HighLevel Cost-Effective?
Before we answer this question, we’ll briefly take a look at the HighLevel pricing system, which we expanded on in a separate article. It consists of three pricing plans and one plan upgrade. You can pay for the pricing plans on a monthly or an annual basis. These are the monthly fees for the plans plus some of the most notable features:
The same plans with the same features paid annually will cost you less:
You’ll find the first two plans under different names on the HighLevel website, so don’t get confused when you see this:
You’ll notice that on the website, HighLevel highlights different features and it only shows the fees for the monthly subscriptions. The Agency Pro is missing, but luckily, you can see all three pricing plans when you sign up for a free trial.
Speaking of which, HighLevel allows you to try both the Starter and Freelancer (Agency Unlimited) plan for two weeks. It requires your credit card information as well as additional information about your business/agency, so don’t forget to cancel on time in case you decide to part ways with the platform.
Finally, this is the plan upgrade with its wordy name:
The purpose of this upgrade is to enable you to have a fully-branded HighLevel account. The Freelancer plan, which is the prerequisite for the upgrade, gives you the possibility to have a white-label desktop app while this upgrade offers a white-label mobile app.
The Value You Get
This is an amazing offering, but it’s not something that everyone needs or can afford. It seems that the target audience is primarily agencies with a large budget that already have or expect to have exclusive, maybe even high-profile clients.
Speaking of a budget, keep in mind that when you purchase a White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade subscription, the full price you pay is $794/month because you pay for both the Freelancer plan as well as the upgrade.
For what it offers and helps you achieve, HighLevel is extremely cost-effective. The high-quality features it provides, along with the unique white-label desktop and mobile apps, as well as the SaaS mode are all impossible to find elsewhere in this price range. That HighLevel is extremely cost-effective is not just our opinion – it’s something that virtually everyone who’s tried the platform agrees on.
On top of this, putting the White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade aside, HighLevel doesn’t require a big budget for you to start using it. For instance, the Starter plan offers so much in terms of quality and quantity but costs less than a hundred bucks.
In the sea of high-value things that HighLevel offers to contemporary businesses, it’s hard to single out which are the best. However, if we had to pick, the HighLevel pricing would be among those on the top.
One-Stop Platform
HighLevel is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform and it takes pride in this. It’s not the only one of its type either; Kartra, ClickFunnels, and HubSpot are some other examples that strive to achieve the same or similar objectives as HighLevel. And yet, HighLevel can replace these as well as so many other platforms (as can be seen in the following image):
The purpose of an all-in-one sales and marketing platform is not to give you access to every possible tool out there but to provide the most helpful tools in one place. Normally, you have to glue many disparate apps together by yourself to cover all of your sales and marketing needs.
The main advantage of an all-in-one platform is that it offers all the necessary tools and then some to run your business in one place – hence the alternative term “one-stop platform” – which makes it a super-convenient business solution.
However, it’s not just convenience that users seek when they’re after a one-stop platform. It’s questions like how well the different tools work together, whether they make the platform bloated and buggy, and if it’s hard to use such a platform that a one-step platform needs to answer convincingly as well. So, how well does HighLevel fare in this regard?
According to our experience, HighLevel performs smoothly, it’s not buggy, and it’s not bloated. It’s an up-to-the-minute platform that uses cutting-edge technologies to solve your practical business problems. Even when issues do come out – for instance, problems with third-party software like Twillio and Mailgun that are part of the HighLevel toolset – the super-responsive HighLevel support team always make sure that they stay on top.
Can HighLevel Help With SEO?
HighLevel can find use in the SEO context as well. Some agencies report having great success with backlinking (also called link building) using this platform.
Backlinking is when other websites link to your website. Normally, the more quality backlinks a site has, the better it ranks with search engines. Quality backlinks are links that are relevant to your site content and come from websites with a high domain authority (for instance, the Guardian as opposed to the local shoe store’s website, because not all sites are created equal). This, along with a consistently high number of backlinks, can result in a much better SEO ranking over time.
What HighLevel can do for you in this context is enable you to automate backlinking. Since HighLevel campaigns are essentially automations, you can target specific sites you want to backlink to you/your client by building a separate campaign. By applying similar mechanisms to those you use to target regular users when doing marketing automation, you can convert your target audience and get more backlinks to your/your client’s website.
Reputation management is another HighLevel feature that can help you with SEO. It works by sending text and email review requests to customers. In the HighLevel context, clients can reply and review the platform from within HL – they don’t need to use other apps (say, their Facebook account). Good reviews and reputation management boost local SEO search engine rankings, so you show higher in user searches related to your business containing your geographical area or the phrase “near me.”
In addition to this, HighLevel lets you configure your SEO metadata – title, description, keywords, author, social image, custom meta tags, etc. – in its funnel and website builder.
Can I Blog on HighLevel?
HighLevel does not include a content management system and blogging functionality. The good news is that, despite this, you can still blog on the platform. Regardless of the host of features it offers out of the box, HighLevel allows you to add more functionalities to your HL account by integrating third-party software with the platform.
As far as blogging and content marketing are concerned, DropInBlog is your friend. It’s a specialized blogging app that integrates smoothly with HighLevel as well as a bunch of other amazing platforms and apps. You can add it to HighLevel through the platform’s built-in site builder. It’s a fairly simple process that will have you ready to blog in a matter of minutes. For more helpful information, check out the How to Create a Blog on HighLevel article.
Different Types of Builders
HighLevel is not Webflow, but it’s worth mentioning that it provides you with a decent website builder. It’s a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to create complete, customizable, and responsive websites. You can preview your site on mobile and desktop and use templates to give you a head start when creating a new site.
In addition to this, you can enjoy these benefits:
- Drag-and-drop landing page builder that allows you to add timers, edit your pages graphically, or use code for customization purposes.
- Drag-and-drop form builder that allows you to create customizable forms and use CSS to change the form styles.
- Drag-and-drop email builder.
- Drag-and-drop funnel builder.
Leads and Conversions
Essentially, HighLevel’s objective is to help you attract and retain as many leads/customers as possible. For that purpose, it gives you access to multiple lead capturing techniques: landing pages, forms, surveys, calendars, phone calls, voicemail, and SMS. It’s not like Mailchimp, where you’re limited to email marketing.
If used with knowledge, HighLevel can help a lot with conversion rate optimization. One way you can achieve this is through scheduling appointments and sending reminders, which seems to be an efficient way to get users to show up for a scheduled appointment. Another tactic that seems to bring higher conversion rates is arranging leads to receive a phone call right after they left their information in a form. Automated phone calls that inform your clients about new leads can also help with conversions by letting your clients strike while the iron is hot.
More Features
In addition to all the features we discussed, on highLevel you’ll find:
- A variety of triggers that allow you to create a multitude of campaigns depending on the trigger/external event.
- A native calendar app.
- A HighLevel mobile app.
- Unlimited number of users (which is not to say that you can have as many clients as you want with every account plan).
- Stripe integration for payment processing.
- Facebook advertising, Google advertising, and social media posting.
- The ability to import funnels from ClickFunnels.
- Rich analytics dashboard.
- Automated follow-up campaigns.
- Two-way messaging.
- Easy-to-configure automation.
- The ability to copy and re-use previously built client accounts.
- A CRM that works better than HubSpot and funnels that are much more up-to-the-minute, functional, and appealing than what you’ll find on ClickFunnels.
- Automated pipelines that contain opportunities, opportunity values, conversion rate stats, and data visualization tools.
- White labeling, meaning that when your clients are interacting with the web app (that’s essentially what HighLevel is), they won’t see any traces of it being associated with any other company but yours. It’s a similar situation with the SaaS mode.
- Tools to track every aspect of your marketing campaigns. It’s all there in black and white, so in case your clients start doubting or are not able to see the value you bring to their business, you can show them everything in a clear, easy-to-understand form.
- Great affiliate program that awards you 40% of any sign-up that you bring to the company.
- Account snapshots/templates for different industries that include forms, landing pages, triggers, and more, which speeds up the whole process of setting up new client accounts.
- Excellent customer support via email, chat, and phone – one of the best things about the platform.
Who Is HighLevel For?
By all accounts, HighLevel is primarily geared toward and popular with digital marketing agencies.
Maybe one of the reasons why this platform has become so popular is because it started solving problems that it was facing as an agency itself. Once it found viable solutions, it started sharing the treasure and helping other agencies in similar situations.
However, it’s not just agencies that can benefit from HighLevel. Based on many customer testimonials, HighLevel is well suited for small businesses as well. The Starter plan shows this very clearly. It can come in especially handy for businesses that need software to help them with follow-up campaigns.
In addition to this, HighLevel is well suited for freelance digital marketers and course creators, the latter due to the possibility to create membership sites.
In the end, since HighLevel is extremely scalable, it’s suitable for anyone who expects steady business growth and needs uncomplicated marketing automation and CRM software that can scale and grow with their business, regardless of whether it’s a regular business or a marketing agency.
New Features, Technologies, and Ease of Use
HighLevel is an up-to-the-minute platform with a modern look and feel. As far as we know, it uses the latest technologies, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, to make your life easier. In that sense, it makes a lot of aspects of modern-day business simpler and easier to handle.
Despite being a relatively new product (the company was launched in 2018), when it comes to the assortment of tools it offers, HighLevel doesn’t lag behind even the most robust and experienced sales and marketing platforms. One of the ways it tries to be at the forefront of business software is by constantly adding new features. Even a glance over the HighLevel Support Portal is sufficient to get the idea of how diligently HighLevel works on new additions to its already rich feature set.
The company consists of very good listeners. It’s not just the quality of the customer support that’s affected positively by this attitude. It’s a part of the company’s culture that reflects in the fact that very often, HighLevel enriches its toolset with a new feature released at the request of its customers.
However, since new features come out often, it can be overwhelming to follow these changes the whole time and catch up with the new tools. Of course, there’s nothing that can turn this awesome side of HighLevel on its head and make it look like a liability. Nevertheless, be ready for a steep learning curve, especially if you lack prior experience in working with software like HighLevel.
So, on the one hand, HighLevel can be overkill for some users, overwhelming when you’re just starting out with the software, and not the easiest to use. On the other hand, it’s a fairly simple platform, considering all the things you can do in it without being overly tech-savvy.
Over and Out
In this article, we tried to answer what HighLevel is. We focused more on aspects that are not discussed that often, but we didn’t miss mentioning some of the most important features closely associated with HighLevel as well. Hopefully, now you have a better and more complete understanding of the amazing and modern sales and marketing platform that HighLevel is.