Bing Webmaster Tools vs. BrightLocal

I always make sure that we are actively using Bing and Google. There is a tradeoff in your time when you use more tools, but there's also benefit in multiple perspectives. And don't forget that Bing is a very viable search engine that receives 500 million search queries each month. You may find that your business benefits from a relatively small amount of attention paid to Bing because search ranking there is easier (not easy, easier).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Clarity. Bing Webmaster Tools is well-designed and easy to navigate, even for beginners.
• Keyword rankings. Gives more visibility than Google Search Console into how your website ranks for specific keywords.
• In-program SEO editing. Allows you to submit URLs, disavow links, block URLs, control BingBot's crawl, and more.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The user-interface isn't as friendly or appealing as Google's - very bland overall.
• The way they present their Page Traffic report is a big turn-off. It's basically just a grid of numbers and arrows which is hard to interpret at a high level.

Incentivized

• Up and down rankings were not always right on with the local search, but only off by one or two spots
• It felt like it was only used for local SEO, and I know there are more features, just never got to them.
• Didn't seem useful for every single client in the way Ahrefs or Spyfu did

Incentivized

Very usable overall, quick to find information and conduct analysis for example of how a price of content is performing on Bing search. User interface is a bit clunky at times but easy enough once you get used to it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I think that Bing does a good job of being a competitive product in a space that has very basic and insanely complex products. While Bing isn't pretty, it gets the job done and also gets you the right tools in a simple and straight forward backend UI. The ability to place Bing ads, track SEO and see how your site is performing, all from one backend interface is awesome!

Incentivized

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.

• Not really an ROI product but the ability to do more tasks than google is something that can be used as added value for clients
• Having another search engine to do reporting on helps increase hours and client spend
• some issues flagged in bing but not seen in google can be fixed once shown in BWT

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized