Ahrefs is an SEO tool providers. Ahrefs Site Explorer provides a suite of tools including a component for backlink & on-page SEO analysis, online brand mentions tracking, and domain comparison tool for competitor analysis, etc. They refer to themselves as “the largest index of live backlinks.”
$99
per month
BrightLocal
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
BrightLocal is a search engine optimization tool that tracks search rankings, builds citations, and monitors online reviews and stresses local search performance.
$39
per month
Pricing
Ahrefs
BrightLocal
Editions & Modules
Lite
$99.00
per month
Standard
$179.00
per month
Advanced
$399.00
per month
Agency
$999.00
per month
Track Plan
$39
per month
Manage Plan
$49
per month
Grow Plan
$59
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Ahrefs
BrightLocal
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
BrightLocal offers custom enterprise plans for businesses with more than 50 locations.
The closest competitor to Ahrefs Site Explorer would likely be SEMRush. Ahrefs seems to have a significantly larger amount of data to work with. They claim that their service is powered by the second most active crawler in the world, next to Google.
I like both of these SEO tools. Working in agency it was nice because I had access to both. At the current company I work at I use SpyFu because our focus is on key words more than local SEO. I would be happy to try out BrightLocal again in the future sometime though
It gives the best report to us which helps us to find the opportunity to build backlinks. Another main feature that makes Ahrefs a safe and sound approach to SEO is that it provides information about duplicate content, URLs, redirects along with other errors that can be dangerous to the website.
If you are a local business owner or marketing agency catering to local businesses, BrightLocal is a must have software. It has everything you need to track your local marketing efforts and to identify opportunities to make improvements, all at a very reasonable price point. You can also create nice looking reports to send to clients which are simple to create.
Backlink data: Ahrefs continues to provide the best backlink data in the industry when compared to other tools. Other players are playing catching up, but as a first mover, Ahrefs is ahead of the game by far.
Keyword data: Ahrefs provides extremely valuable keyword data. Though I rank them second in this category, the data that they provide is comparable to the first ranked player.
Content Explorer: I don't think other industry tools (SEO specific) has a content explorer as useful as Ahrefs. Their content explorer works great for identifying top content and trends for multiple industries.
Rank Tracker: This rank tracker is better than the average tracker and Ahrefs provides a large limit for tracked keywords. Though they have moved away from daily updates, the rank tracker is great for bench marking progress.
When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.
Anchor text alert notifications for a specific domain would be nice to have.
Would also be nice to set a specific client domain and then be able to pick 5 competitor sites to compare it to instead of entering in the client site and then 4 competitors to compare.
Adding emails to forward the exports to from running a report would be good too.
Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get
Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.
Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.
Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.
I think when it comes to keyword tracking, Ahrefs is not as good BrightEdge, but Ahrefs Site Explorer trumps BrightEdge when it comes to anything backlink related. I would use Ahrefs Site Explorer for backlink analysis, identifying 404 error pages, examining anchor texts, and exploring top content. However, I would utilze BrightEdge for keyword and ranking information
Thryv reached out to me about 3 weeks before signing up with BrightLocal. While all of their features were impressive, there were only about 3 features that I would have used. Thryv wanted $200 per month for their service, which I found to be way overpriced for what I was wanting to use it for. I selected BrightLocal because it had the features I wanted at a lower price and then add ons. After using BrightLocal for a week and speaking with Becki, a customer service executive, I have discovered more features that I would use on BrightLocal than on Thryv.
BrightLocal's ranking reports have helped us better serve our clients' SEO needs, especially local SEO.
Reporting is nicely accomplished with their online client report dashboards.
Negative: some of their software defects are glaringly obvious take forever to fix, creating a number of awkward moments when we talk our clients through their reports.
