BrightLocal vs. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

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

We have a client base within our organization of about ~5,000, so it can be difficult to keep track of all of their marketing status/standings. The Whitespark Local Citation Finder removes the aspect of human error and ensures that we are providing fast, reliable results for thousands of our clients. Being able to see our competitor's citation summary is a large advantage, not other products such as this provides.

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

• The information within the finder is very accurate, which eliminates us having to dig through the internet for citations.
• The reports are automated for you, so there's no extra work on the user's end.

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

• One small improvement I'd recommend is creating the ability to connect to 3rd party platforms, such as Google Data Studio

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

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.

We have used BrightLocal in the past, which was a great platform. The biggest difference between Whitespark and BrightLocal is its usability. BrightLocal can be difficult to navigate, while Whitespark is much more straightforward and easily navigatable. Within our large organization, we also use the Whitespark Rank Tracker, so being able to utilize multiple Whitespark products streamlines a lot of our processes.

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

• The positive ROI has been seen through our client's renewal %. Since we are able to provide accurate reporting, they trust the work that is presented to them more than not.

Incentivized