BrightLocal vs. Majestic SEO

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

Majestic is a really great tool if your company is spending considerable resources on ongoing SEO efforts. In general, Majestic isn't for beginner SEO users, but a more advanced tool to get into deep SEO tactics. I would recommend this for agencies that have a significant investment in SEO. If you're a small team or a small business looking to improve SEO for yourself or company, there are platforms that offer a variety of tools for new to moderate expertise.

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

• I like Majestic's own metrics Trust and Citation flow, that are very representative of the real value of the website and it's potential effect on the rankings of the website it's linking to.
• Also, theme (topic) of the website is very useful in the backlink report. This allows to easily identify backlinks relevant to your business.
• The index of number of backlinks that is provided by Majestic is usually a lot bigger than the indexes of their competitors.
• Lost link tracker is very useful for tracking dropped links of your projects (you can verify and track multiple domains). This allows to keep track on how many of your ads and articles stay live and sometimes we contact publishers to tell them that their changes on the website (i.e. updates) caused our article or link to go down.

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

• Its API for developers and big companies sometime don't give the actual data.
• Rank tracker is not 100% accurate, but you can create a rough estimate by the report.
• Backlink history is also missing some links, but I found them mostly.
• Sometimes site explorer does not give the actual report, so you should check manually too.

Incentivized

Once you've grown accustomed to the depth and accuracy of Majestic's crawl, it's hard to consider paying for anything else (or settling for free options). SEMRush and MOZ can get you somewhere, but in the right hands, a tool as powerful as Majestic can do a lot for a business's link building strategy.

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

In started when our team started to use this tool, we had trouble understanding many of its features, so its customer support team was our teacher to understand all its complicated features and also how they are used to get better results. Nowadays we are working very efficiently without any help.

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.

Majestic has features that most of their competitors don't. The backlink index is better than SEMRush in my opinion which also lacks being able to look at links from a range of dates. Their metrics are harder to fool when compared to Moz and I would say that AHREF's is a good competitor but each company keeps their own index of links so its good to use more than one tool

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

• ROI is difficult to ascertain in healthcare marketing, mostly due to privacy laws. Although, Majestic has improved our insight into our digital content, giving us data to work with on the primary site, which has led to an overall increase in organic search.

Incentivized