BrightLocal vs. CognitiveSEO

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

CognitiveSEO is a very useful tool for any company looking to boost its marketing effort substantially. While telemarketing is an excellent way to generate new business, online marketing campaigns are crucial in today's society when it comes to prospecting for new business opportunities. Occasionally it can be difficult to reach new audiences who are in fact an appropriate fit for the products you offer. CognitiveSEO helps you target market those audiences and utilize the most out of your marketing efforts.

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

• New link alerts
• Competitive analysis
• Toxic link reports

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

• The interface can be clunky
• It's a bit too all-in-one for me as I use other solutions for features like rank tracking and mentions
• You are unlikely to use all the features you are paying for

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

They do not respond quickly to any questions or the one time I had an issue. I had resolved the issue myself before they gave a response

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.

CognitiveSEO specializes in target marketing for more efficient marketing campaigns and lead generation. While I am not too familiar with other competing products, I would highly advise using CognitiveSEO above all due to the efficiency, turnaround time, and customization features to attract new leads based on specific criteria that relate to your products and daily procedures.

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

• We've cleaned up link profiles which clients have appreciated
• With the on-going link monitoring we've spent less time re-auditing link profiles
• Anchor text monitoring also sped up our toxic review

Incentivized