BrightLocal vs. Rankinity

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

Rankinity is well-suited for agencies that provide SEO services for some clients. It's a great stepping stone tool while an agency scales it's services and builds a book of SEO clients since you pay per keyword check. The frequency of checks can be set for each client (project) so if services are performed monthly, you can set checks to happen at the beginning of the month

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

• Pay Per Ranking Check
• Track Keyword Rankings by Location
• Keyword Groups and Weighting

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

• Keyword grouping could be more intuitive
• Historical data is not always easy to pull

Incentivized

We've seen one major platform update (user interface overhaul). This has made the system much easier to use. There are some features that could still be improved like historical rankings but overall the system is good and aligns with the expectation for what you pay for it. Not a whole lot to complain about on the usability side of things

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

No chat support, only email support. Whenever I've used their support system, I have received responses in 1-2 business days and the solution addressed my needs/concerns. I've really only had a couple of instances where I've needed to reach out to their support team since the system is pretty straight forward and easy to use.

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.

Rankinity is simpler solution that's different than the all-in-one type solutions we've also used. A lot of it comes down to process and how service offerings are built for clients. We use Rankinity for clients where we're tracking a lot of keywords in a lot of different geographic areas because it's a more cost-effective solutions. But for larger clients, we typically rely on all-in-one solutions that offer more tools for SEO.

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

• Low-cost solution
• Scalable as client list grows

Incentivized