Item: BrightEdge
Rating: 9
Author: Rex Camposagrado

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use BrightEdge's Data Cube almost 80% of the time for keyword research, checking organic ranking positions, competitive analysis, and keyword gap analysis. We also use Recommendations and Intent Signal Dashboards to find out what content to defend, or top opportunities to go after. It helps us with our content creation and also lets us know what we have to do to our evergreen content to get it to rank higher.

Pros and Cons

Keyword research is very good and Data Cube is very easy to use as compared to other SEO Enterprise tools.
Keyword gap analysis is very helpful to find out what keywords our competitors are using that we are not.
Monitoring organic rank positions is very easy with Data Cube.

The Content IQ doesn't catch all technical SEO issues as compared to other site audit or crawler tools.
The Content IQ score is very high, but when comparing to other SEO site audit tools they show lower scores because they are picking up more errors.
There are some bugs or suggestions that are not good in Recommendations.

Return on Investment

Gives a better picture of how our website is doing organically in blended searches.
Gives recommendations for improvement for our organic SEO efforts.
By increasing our organic exposure, it drives more leads to our website producing very high ROI.

Usability

I've used and had demos of other SEO Enterprise tools and by far BrightEdge is the easiest to use. This is especially helpful when I have non-technical people involved like content writers, traditional marketing people, or management as users. If I were to introduce other SEO Enterprise tools other than BrightEdge, they would lose interest fast because those tools are too complicated for the average layman.

Support Rating

BrightEdge Customer Success Managers have always been good. However, they usually set me up with brand new employees with the company. Although they are still learning, they get the questions answered if they don't know off-hand. The only drawback that I saw was that a couple of years ago I went through 3 CSMs at another company. This was because they would assign me a new CSM and then a few weeks later BrightEdge would say that our CSM was no longer with the company, so they kept assigning me new ones.

Alternatives Considered

Conductor Searchlight, seoClarity, SEMRush, RavenTools and Screaming Frog SEO Spider

BrightEdge is easier to use compared to Conductor. seoClarity was my second option, but I only had a demo and haven't worked with it deeply. It seemed like a good tool. Botify looked like it was better for Technical SEO and looks more advanced for that feature, but it didn't have the other features that BrightEdge offered and wouldn't be as user-friendly for the average layman.

Other Software Used

Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMRush, RavenTools

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for an SEO tool for keyword research, monitoring organic ranking positions, competitive analysis, content topic recommendations, and keyword reporting, then BrightEdge is a very good tool. The Content IQ site audit could use some work. When letting a BrightEdge Customer Success Manager know about the differences that I was seeing, he said that there is no harm in using other tools to do site audits for comparison.

BrightEdge is a very robust SEO enterprise tool

Overall Satisfaction with BrightEdge