TrustRadius Insights for BrightLocal are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
BrightLocal has proven to be an invaluable tool for managing local business clients' marketing efforts. Users appreciate the comprehensive range of features, including tracking Google My Business, web analytics, citations, online reviews, and keyword rankings. With the citation tracking feature, users can easily identify where they have citations and where they need to create or correct them. The reputation manager feature allows for efficient monitoring of online reviews across multiple platforms. Additionally, BrightLocal's storage of 18 months of historical data for Google My Business is a significant advantage compared to Google's limited three-month data retention.
The ability to generate customizable reports is highly valued by users. Whether it's creating printable PDF reports or web-based reports via custom links, BrightLocal streamlines the reporting process. This is particularly beneficial when using BrightLocal on a client-by-client basis, allowing account management teams to provide detailed insights and analysis for each client's local SEO performance. Moreover, BrightLocal's citation building service is highly regarded for providing quality citations at a reasonable price.
Users also appreciate the educational materials offered by BrightLocal that aid in explaining concepts to clients. It consolidates data from various sources, allowing users to monitor reviews, website ranking, and information accuracy on third-party sites all in one place. Furthermore, BrightLocal's user-friendly online client dashboards receive positive feedback from clients who find them easy to navigate and understand.
Overall, BrightLocal is widely used for managing local SEO for digital marketing clients and offers a valuable toolset that saves time and consolidates valuable resources. With its ability to analyze search engine rankings and existing citations, it helps users improve their local SEO performance while also saving time and money. The insights provided by BrightLocal on local competitors and opportunities for improvement are highly appreciated by users. Whether it's updating online directories or showcasing expertise through automated reports and site audits, BrightLocal offers a variety of features that fulfill the needs of its users.
We use BrightLocal to monitor everything from our reviews to website ranking and how accurate our information is on third-party sites. It has been incredibly useful in consolidating our data into one place where we can easily monitor and make updates as needed. We use it to manage all of our business locations.
Pros
Customer support is excellent
Really intuitive user interface
Makes listing management easy
Cons
Running reports is very slow
Likelihood to Recommend
BrightLocal is really useful for broadening the reach of your business. You can have them manually add your listing to other websites or update existing listings, manage reviews, see how well you rank in search and so much more. It's pretty awesome.
BrightLocal has extensive resources to help your business.
BrightLocal has amazing customer service.
Cons
Currently unsure.
Likelihood to Recommend
I recently broke away from corporation gyms and decided to start my own personal training business in Plano, TX. Looking to expand my visibility in order to bring in new clients, I signed up for BrightLocal after taking a Udemy class on optimizing my Google Business Page. I have not even had BrightLocal for a week and I have already seen a tripling increase in views on my Google Business Page and an increase in the number of people who have reached out to me. I signed up for the citation builder campaign and the campaign isn't even finished. BrightLocal also set me up with a customer service executive named Becki who was absolutely lovely! She gave me lots of things to think about and action steps to take to further expand the reach of my business. I haven't even been with BrightLocal for a month and I'm already so grateful for them! I highly recommend them and their services to help you grow your business!
I run a small, solo private psychiatric practice. BrightLocal has helped me monitor my online reputation and has insights into how my business marketing compares with my local competitors. With this information, I can take proactive steps to address deficiencies.
Pros
Citation builder has helped immensely in distributing my practice information to major platforms
Monitoring online reputation
Cons
The program does require some understanding of SEO optimization. BrightLocal Academy courses help with this, but it does require some education.
Likelihood to Recommend
BrightLocal is well-suited for consistent broad marketing on several platforms. The online reputation management tools are also very helpful.
Research and improve Local SEO ranking for clients. Report on client's situation from reviews, local search results and their competitors and the competitors status. They provide a citation building service which is very good and has helped several of my clients. They also provide a lot of smart education materials which have helped me explain to clients.
Pros
Citation building
Local search tracking
Competitor tracking compared to our clients
Review reports
Cons
More suggestions on options to improve client situations
Ability to print reports
Likelihood to Recommend
They are terrific for helping improve clients who depend on local search with tools and guidance.
I am currently the only one using BrightLocal in my organization. I have 2 employees that I have not yet trained and I am not sure if they will be using it anytime soon. The program helps push info out to directories, provides valuable reports and helps with reviews.
Pros
reporting
review generation
directory submission
Cons
the program is large and can be hard to figure out
needing extra credits or to pay extra is common
the reviews might be hard to generate to GMB
Likelihood to Recommend
If an agency has a team and is posting to more than 20 platforms it will work well, anything less I would recommend looking at something else. The price is really good for larger agencies. I would not recommend for a single business with less than 2 locations that is wanting a scheduler for their own platforms, it is too cumbersome for that.
Great tool for updating local online directories and adding to new ones. Good for seeing the current scene of their listings. I feel I can trust them because they also allow you to communicate a specific message regarding each campaign.
Pros
Gather all online listings/citations that your client is in.
Provide a comprehensive list of online citations.
Cons
Less follow up needed - I know BrightLocal is at the mercy of the citations themselves, but it would be great if you didn't have to do follow up verifications.
Having to do phone verifications is frustrating.
Likelihood to Recommend
The biggest selling point IMO is that it's as one-time payment to update listings. This is the opposite of Yext where you're almost "renting" the info being correct on your listings. This is a HUGE selling point. BrightLocal "bursts" the data out to listings and Aggregators alike, which is fantastic, with a one-time fee instead of monthly. It also allows for discounts with bulk amounts of listings. Lastly, the downside is that it is not set and forget - there are some listings you have to manually do things with, though they do provide logins and anything you might need.
We currently use all of BrightLocal's features from the rankings down to social media. We use it as a tool to track the search engine optimization progress to see what improvements we can make and improve their digital marketing. It's also a tool that allows us to keep multiple facets of their marketing in one CRM.
Pros
Beautiful reputation reporting
Easy to navigate
Cons
Cannot have multiple geo-locations in one rankings report.
System is sometimes slow and buggy.
Likelihood to Recommend
This would be well suited for small businesses looking to track single local locations. The reporting system for reviews is one of their best features and is great at showing a trend over time. It is also good to put potential customers in there and run a local audit in order to show companies how you can help them grow and what their business is missing.
BrightLocal is a must have for Local SEO and marketing. We have been using it for years to help manage local business clients. BrightLocal allows us to create a single platform for all of our local marketing efforts, we can track Google My Business, web analytics, citations, online reviews and even keyword rankings all in a single dashboard.
The citation tracking feature is very useful to see where you have citations and where you need to create or correct citations and the reputation manager feature is a great way to monitor your online reviews across multiple review platforms.
One of my favorite features is being able to access historical data for Google My Business. Google only allows 3 months of data, but BrightLocal stores 18 months of data for you to analyze and compare. Report creation is also simple, allowing us to create printable PDF reports or web-based reports via custom links.
Pros
All in one local marketing dashboard and reporting makes analyzing data and creating reports a breeze.
Being able to monitor online reviews across dozens of review websites
Local marketing audit tool to analyze areas of opportunity
Being able to track keyword rankings on a city specific level, a must have for rank tracking at a local level
Cons
The citation tracking tool often misses live citations for your business so you always need to verify the results before taking action
The Local Pack rankings in the Google My Business section are usually off since it is very specific to the location of the searcher
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We used BrightLocal to manage local SEO for our digital marketing clients. It was one of the key platforms we used to perform research, reporting, and optimization to improve local search rankings. It saved our team a significant amount of time by consolidating a number of valuable tools in one place.
Pros
A suite of local SEO tools, all in one place.
Simplified local SEO reporting for clients.
Tools for building local and niche citations.
Cons
BrightLocal is focused on local SEO, which is a strength, but I needed to invest in other SEO tools to supplement.
Likelihood to Recommend
BrightLocal is a good choice for an agency that is providing local SEO services for multiple clients. BrightLocal automates research and reporting work that would take hours for someone to complete manually, and the local and niche citation building services provide a framework for building and maintaining citations for clients at scale.
BrightLocal was used on a client by client basis. If it was a client that we wanted to focus on local SEO with, we would use BrightLocal. Many clients didn't have that need and we would use other SEO software for their needs, although BrightLocal does have many useful capabilities beyond local. That was its primary use case for me.
Pros
Track and monitor local SEO rankings
Build citations
Easy to navigate
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
The best scenario I can think of is local small business clients. They needed to be as high up in the local box as possible, and BrightLocal provided us easy ways to monitor that and track it. It was also a positive experience building citations through their builder. Citations went up, as well as rankings
