If you're serious about SEO, use a serious tool
January 11, 2019
If you're serious about SEO, use a serious tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BrightEdge
As the only SEO professional on a small team, I use BrightEdge to track our search visibility and core keywords, do keyword research, and scope out competitors. It provides a depth and breadth of search analytics, particularly around rankings, that I haven't been able to replicate with other tools. It helps us address the business problem of search visibility and site traffic, which in turn drives conversions and leads.
- Their DataCube site and ranking analysis is the best in the business. I'd use BrightEdge for this feature alone. With this research tool, I can understand our keyword rankings profile across all keywords (beyond those tracked in our account), as well as those of competitors and partners.
- Site Audit is also very strong, allowing us to get a deep understanding of technical errors on our site we need to correct. This was indispensable during a recent major site update.
- The Customer Success Managers are helpful and knowledgeable.
- The main weakness of the platform concerns off-page SEO. We use Majestic to supplement the kind of backlink tracking and reporting we want to do, functionality that is somewhat addressed within BrightEdge but not to the point where I could stop using Majestic.
- The most recent updates to the platform seem to be concerned only with look and feel (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but I'd like to see more in the way of new features added.
- The recommendations engine is valuable, but I feel the suggestions are often too narrowly focused on exact match keywords, even though search engines continue to get smarter about which variations of keywords relate to which topics (e.g. latent semantic indexing). I'd like to see the recommendations engine get up to date with these changes.
- In the past 3 years, with the help of BrightEdge and a dedicated focus on digital marketing & SEO, we've improved keywords ranked on Google page 1 from single digits to triple digits.
- Percentage of site traffic from search also improved 13X.
- We went from generating little to no meaningful lead activity from search to creating a steady stream of qualified leads from the site, accounting for significant new logo sales/opportunities.
Moz is a good tool to start with, and I've used it with very small companies that are starting SEO essentially from scratch and don't want to have much of an initial cost outlay. BrightEdge is far more robust functionality-wise, especially when it comes to rank tracking and reporting, to the point where I feel it's worth the higher cost.