BrightLocal vs. Link Research Tools

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

If you have any problems with your rankings or a decrease in ranking position within google it is very good to make an Link Audit with the Link Research Tools. Then you Screen all Links manually and setup your disavow-file easily. With the Link Detox Boost you gain Rankings back so fast. The last time we used it for a client, we got back the rankings within a week to 170 Positions within the Top Ten, even Position 1.

• 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

• fast Google penalty recovery
• keeps a healthy backlink profile
• calculates the opportunity or risk of potential links that are not built yet, so you can go only after the good ones
• gives you fresh data from 26 link sources and lets you analyze the full backlink profile. Google search console gives you only a sample of your backlink profile.
• powerful link prospecting made easy
• possibility to connect with Pitchbox (professional outreach tool for link removal and link building campaigns), SEMRUSH, Ahrefs, GSC

• 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

• Not for newcomers to SEO simply because its vast array of features may hinder them.
• Is quite pricey too; so for small businesses etc., it's probably not a viable option.

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

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.

LinkResearchTools is much more advanced in analyzing links. Period. All the other mentioned tools have many useful features for SEO but LRT is definitely the way to go for backlink analysis, link building, and competition analysis. They also offer very nice and quality courses for improving SEO knowledge. I already attended one of them and I am very satisfied with the knowledge I gained.

• 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

• Building strong links results in better rankings which results in a higher ROI
• The Link Research Tools community also had a big impact on my networking