BrightEdge vs. gShift (discontinued) vs. Semrush

BrightEdge is great for large companies and large SEO teams since it's pricey but worth it if you have a large team or organization using it. For small businesses, I would use a different tool like Semrush because of the price and the variety of tools it offers.

Incentivized

gShift's pace of development is pretty amazing and they are very responsive to enhancement requests and other feedback on their solutions. gShift is well-suited for an agency environment where multiple clients need the basics in keyword rankings and website analytics and PPC reporting integration. gShift is less suited for a large organizations with multiple properties or web presences that are all integrated but require silos for reporting purposes or any type of parent-child reporting relationship that necessitates reporting at the property level as well as summarized reporting for all properties.

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This is suited to plan for keywords in a single market, but it struggles when you need to consolidate several markets. It is well-suited to discover new keywords directly related to the ones being used currently to expand the content the company is creating to get better results.

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• Instant - Keyword research tool is by far our team's favorite item on the platform
• DataCube - We are able to uncover competitive gaps and hone in on specific sets of pages using filters containing our business product assortment attribute.
• Professional services have been attentive when asking for changes

• Bringing most of your applications to one platform.
• Managing Gmail Accounts.
• Bringing all your communication channels to one spot.
• Easy setup and account integration.

Incentivized

• Great visuals for keyword position tracking, love that you can see the page that is ranking
• Enjoyed the auto-generated reporting feature (specifically in the context of keyword position tracking)
• Shows many different and useful views for competitive research
• Great templated keyword research tools for those who are not as hands-on with SEO
• I LOVE the Keyword Magic Tool for honing in on longtail, high-opportunity keywords

• The storybuilder feature isn't anything outstanding. I feel like I can get the same type of data and format from Google Data Studio.
• I feel like the Hyperlocal feature is still very junior compared to other features. It provides you good insights, but you have to set all the data fields before you can get a picture as well as it doesn't really give you an idea of how you can improve.
• The mobile SEO solution is a good concept, but it needs some tweaks to be better, especially when building out a mobile story builder. Some of the data isn't simple to read and the mobile keywords functions don't also account for voice searches.

Incentivized

• Minor bugs and defects are an ongoing issue - for example, PDF export capability for custom dashboards seems to be down frequently. While these type of defects are always resolved in 1-2 weeks, the fact that some of them keep reoccurring is an ongoing frustration.
• Custom Dashboard functionality is limited to pre-set defaults as far as what data points or "beacons" as gShift calls them, that you could pull.

Incentivized

• Extra seats can be expensive, as [an] agency with multiple team members this can be frustrating
• Backlink data is not great, misses out a lot of backlinks (better off using a specialist backlink tool like Link research tools LRT)
• Tracking multiple keywords, across multiple clients can be costly

I would renew, as I don't feel there is a product out there that would have the impact on our SEO efforts as effectively as BrightEdge. It provides the information I need and integrates with other tools like Google Webmaster Tools, to truly have the depth of information that makes their suggestions for SEO changes so valued.

I [previously] used Semrush for many years and I cannot find any other tool being so complete and easy to use.

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Because it depends on the feature, it's either easier or not to use. Some of them, not being particularly friendly, I no longer use, and I focus on the ones where insights are easy to understand and data seems well-elaborated.

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The interface is a little less intuitive than it could be. The data is often available but filtering and manipulating the data can be a little difficult at times. Expanded comparisons would be helpful since most of the time seeing more than a few competitors at a time allows for a better sense of how to forecast.

Incentivized

Semrush available when you need it!

SemRush performs well with few errors!

This is a area where the BrightEdge team really shines. Their commitment to training and product support is unmatched not only for SEO platforms, but life in general. I often find myself wishing my internet provide and similar would go to BrightEdge for training on support and attitude. I would rank them an 11 if I could.

I'm in a FB group for Semrush paid users and it amazing! They are fast to respond, take suggestions and help with questions. I have not felt alone in using this product at all. Highly recommend their support team. When I had an issue I can jump into the group and they will help get me the right person to help or even tag their programmers to look at something that is going on. Love the group!

For the most part it was seamless. The load time of clients was a little long, but otherwise was quite easy.

I did it by myself and do not have a comment!

While relatively expensive, Brightedge really does offer the best quality product but just as importantly (if not more so) the level of client/agency support. We have biweekly training with the entire team to continually stay up to date on Brightedge's offerings and strategies. They also offer the ability to do ad hoc reporting using some of their tools that can help us win new business and recommend Brightedge to additional clients, expanding our business as well.

They are very different tools can't compare them.

Incentivized

We have used both Ahrefs and Semrush extensively at our agency and Semrush remains the tool of choice. We find that Semrush has the largest selection of tools & features to use, with the highest accuracy, and provides top-tier analysis recommendations. It's really is the ultimate all-in-one tool when comparing other performance measurement tools in the digital marketing space.

Incentivized

Semrush is flexible and scalable software which can be deployed across multiple departments and sites as needed.

• We have only started with BE a few months ago and so I don't have any hard numbers from an ROI perspective, but i can say that what we spent on BE is a fraction of what we were spending with agencies and we are actually getting results by doing this ourselves. From that perspective we have seen a cost savings.
• With focused SEO campaigns and projects we have been able to move the needle on our SEO rankings for specific products and services. This is going to have a great impact for us in 2019 as we have some specific product goals and campaigns for 2019 that we have been working to build up over the last couple months of 2018.

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• We have been able to identify other keyword ranking opportunities and increase our on-site conversion rate.
• gShift has helped us prioritize content and discover content that is over-performing, and better optimize that content and use it for remarketing purposes.

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• Using Semrush on behalf of our clients, we have seen some impressive growth in organic visibility, traffic, conversion and revenue, across multiple industries.
• The site checks available with Semrush have helped us to pitch and sell our services, securing new clients.

Incentivized