BrightEdge vs. UpCity

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

For our purposes, UpCity is well suited to our small business clients that are looking to improve their SEO. We have had a good partnership with UpCity to provide consulting and copywriting services for local search, social media and reputation management for our clients, and their software and reporting helps us show ROI to our clients.

Incentivized

• 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

• Customized marketing checklist is incredible!
• The way UpCity verifies items in your marketing checklist (like whether you have social accounts, you're on Google, etc,) helps my business, and others, save precious time having to manually verify them yourself.
• I love the impact scores and estimated time shown on each task to give us a feel of how much we are doing each month and what value that time spent is.
• The "about" and "how to" section on tasks makes it very clear how to accomplish each task.

Incentivized

• 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

• Unwillingness to help dissatisfied customers
• Unwillingness to address issues
• False advertising regarding the number of click throughs and leads
• Rude customer service reps that don’t help with your issues
• Expensive service
• Little value for money

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.

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.

Incentivized

Usability is mediocre: They have a dashboard to track things but they have some antiquated system of ranking companies and don’t tell you what the logic is behind it. You also have no way to combat negative ratings or respond and try to correct them.

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 received little help from customer service rep, Sarah. She told me I should speak to a manager to “reset my expectations”. Apparently, all the sales promises of more traffic and increase SEO were an issue with my expectations, and not the company failing to deliver.

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

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.

We selected UpCity primarily because of the ongoing services they provide. The UpCity software is a simple platform that enables us to easily show progress and ROI to our clients.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• UpCity was costly for us because we were small. If we were a 10 person agency, the price would be right in line with what we need.
• UpCity has taught us many processes we needed to continue helping our clients be successful.

Incentivized