Item: BrightEdge
Rating: 10
Author: Shane Adair

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We decided to bring our SEO management in-house after realizing we were paying agencies to basically do nothing. We spent a lot of money on SEO with no recommendations and changes happening. Now that we have brought it in-house it has been a huge undertaking for our small team, but it has given us a lot of insights in what could have been and should have been done previously. We have control over what is happening and are in it almost daily making changes and corrections to our site based on the recommendations we get from BrightEdge.

Pros and Cons

It helps us find items that we missed in our site build such as image alt text, H2 fixes, missing descriptions, etc. It is so easy to gloss over some of these items as there are just so many of them, BE brings these to the forefront and you can see them all the time and decide what items need to be corrected.
The BE team is outstanding! Our CSM is solid and is a HUGE help for us. We have consistent calls with them and they help us, non-SEO professionals, become more knowledgeable in what we are doing and has us thinking about future projects that we would never have thought of on our own. They are a integral piece of our team now.
The on-boarding process was amazing! The on-boarding specialist had our best interests at heart and was a huge help, they then handed us off to an equally knowledgeable and qualified Client Success Manager. Customer service at BE is top-notch.

I really can't comment here, because being a novice going into this I don't know what I don't know. So far everything has been great.

Return on Investment

We have only started with BE a few months ago and so I don't have any hard numbers from an ROI perspective, but i can say that what we spent on BE is a fraction of what we were spending with agencies and we are actually getting results by doing this ourselves. From that perspective we have seen a cost savings.
With focused SEO campaigns and projects we have been able to move the needle on our SEO rankings for specific products and services. This is going to have a great impact for us in 2019 as we have some specific product goals and campaigns for 2019 that we have been working to build up over the last couple months of 2018.

Alternatives Considered

We were using agencies for this work in the past and we were not having the feedback and help that we had been expecting from them. We were just paying money with getting nothing in return. We decided to bring this in-house and because of a past relationship with BrightEdge we turned back to them and dove right in. This has been the best decision we could have made. While it does take time and has added responsibilities to our day, we now have total control over changes and fixes to our SEO strategy.

Other Software Used

Marketo, Conversica, Uberflip

Likelihood to Recommend

For us, this has been a huge improvement over agency help. We may have just had bad experiences with agencies, but we did have two of them that billed us for non-action, so my view is a little skewed. BE has allowed us to learn and make changes on the fly and we have seen our ranking increase in ways and areas we would never have thought of before. They are a great team to work with and have made SEO easier to understand and influence for me as I had no hands-on experience beforehand.

Users and Roles

1 - I am the Marketing Manager and I handle most all of our vendor relationships and digital marketing strategies and products. While i depend on agencies for a lot of support the SEO portion was just a money-pit and we decided to try doing it ourselves. This solution has allowed us to do just that.

Support Headcount Required

1 - Me. I am the only one using it and supporting it. My skill set was knowledge of SEO and all digital marketing high-level strategies, but the day-to-day working knowledge was not there. This was a huge undertaking for me to bring this in-house and take on that role without royally screwing everything up. The BE team did not allow me to fail, they are awesome and have been with me every step of the way.

Business Processes Supported

Overall site SEO.
Specific product and services SEO.
Money savings of handling SEO in-house agency help to do so.

Innovative Uses

I am not sure about unexpected or innovative, we have just been able to make some small changes and fixes that we didn't know we needed to do on our site. That was an eye-opener for me.

Future Planned Uses

We are starting to get product and service specific with our SEO campaigns as well as regionally specific. These are big steps for us.

Likelihood to Renew

There is no way we aren't renewing. This has been a great add to our MarTech stack.

Support Rating

I have had ZERO negative interactions with BE. Everyone has been incredibly helpful and timely. OUR CSM is very attentive to our success as was our on-boarding specialist. Whenever I have questions or concerns they are quick to respond and always have a solution for our issues or have answers to my questions. They have been p[patient and understanding of my non-workable knowledge coming into this and have helped me grow my skill set and understanding of SEO strategies.

BrightEdge Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Exceptional Examples of BrightEdge Support

This is an easy question to answer - EVERY time I have had an interaction with their team it has been exceptional support. At times i wonder if we are just lucky, but if we are I will take the good luck. Their team has been second to none each and every time we have an interaction.

Usability

I will most likely give it a 10 in the future once i am better at using it. For now, with my limited knowledge it has seemed a bit daunting and overwhelming. However, the BE team has helped tremendously!

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Convenient	Requires technical support Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

Seeing what the system recommends as changes.
Seeing performance on the dashboard

Difficult Tasks

Keep in mind, I was a novice at the day-to-day behind the scenes workings of SEO, so all of this was new to me. Understanding how all of it tied together at first seemed overwhelming.
Setting up keyword groups and then refining them...again, it isn't hard, it just took me some time, luckily their CSM is amazing!

BrightEdge has given us what we lacked from agencies - RESULTS.

Overall Satisfaction with BrightEdge