“Local SEO Made Simple”
BrightLocal promises “Local SEO Made Simple” on its home page. It delivers on that promise. How does it do that? With three types of services:
- Local SEO Tools – Visualize all your data in one place, take control of your online reputation, and monitor rankings from a single point of entry.
- Aggregator Submissions – Distribute important info about your business to thousands of directories all over the world.
- Citation Building – Dominate Local SEO with consistent citations that help you achieve a top rank.
BrightLocal also markets itself as a comprehensive Local SEO solution. That’s convenient if you’re looking to consolidate all your Local SEO efforts under the umbrella of a single service. In the next several sections, I’ll go over the features of BrightLocal so you can determine if it’s a tool that you should add to your digital marketing toolbox.
BrightLocal Review: Rank Checker
First up: BrightLocal tracks local rankings. It’s not just straight organic rankings, though. BrightLocal follows mobile and maps rankings as well. You’ll also get rankings from each of the “Big 3” in search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Looking for mobile rankings? BrightLocal has you covered there as well. Additionally, the tool will show you how much your rankings have improved over time. That will give you some insight into whether your Local SEO efforts are paying off. BrightLocal will also let you see how visible your business is to people in any location. Just plug in a zip code or the name of a town in the reporting section to see where you rank in that area. If you’re too busy to check reports all the time, that’s no problem. Set up alerts so that the tool will send you an email when there’s a change in one of your rankings. It gets better. BrightLocal will not only track your rankings, but it will even track the rankings of your citations. That info will show you the online visibility of sources that search engines are using to find your business. Are you running a multi-location business? If so, then you’ll be happy to learn that the tool will compare rankings for as many as hundreds of locations in one place. Use “roll up” reports to see how your various sites compare with each other for specific search terms.
Citation Building
Citations are online references to your local business. They typically include the business name, address, and phone number (NAP). They’re also an extremely important part of any Local SEO strategy. Fortunately, BrightLocal makes it easy to get citations. How does it do that? With several different types of services:
- Manual clean-up work to ensure consistent NAP across all web properties
- Building new, accurate citations on sites where they don’t exist
- Distributing NAP data via local aggregators
- Creation of Google My Business (GMB) and Bing local listings
- Removal of duplicate citations
BrightLocal allows you to pick the sites where you want your business listed. Then, the company does all the heavy lifting on your behalf. In other words, it’s a terrific service if you’d rather focus on growing your business instead of getting citations. BrightLocal will also push your business info to data aggregators such as:
- Neustar Localeze
- Acxiom
- InfoUSA
- Factual
The company will also claim and verify your local citations. That way, you’ll have ownership of them going forward. Why is that important? Because that means you’ll control the info that those directories display. If you’ve got a multi-location business, no worries. BrightLocal already partners with some of the biggest multi-location businesses in the world. The company’s team members have the experience necessary to ensure that all your sites are optimized for local search. Finally, BrightLocal supports local citations in 10 countries:
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Canada
- Singapore
- Ireland
- South Africa
- Germany
- United Kingdom
- Netherlands
- United States
BrightLocal Review: Citation Tracker
It’s not good enough to just obtain citations. You need to track them as well. BrightLocal lets you do that with its citation tracker. First, the citation tracker lets you spot NAP issues. That’s important because an inconsistent NAP across different websites can hurt your local search rank. When the tool does spot inconsistencies, you can prioritize which listings to fix first. Next, the citation tracker also highlights the top sites for citations. That’s so you can see which high-value websites don’t include your listing. Duplicate listings could also hurt your search rank. Fortunately, BrightLocal will identify those dupes so you can eliminate them. Additionally, the tool will enable you to “spy” on your competitors. It does that by showing you their SEO citations. Armed with that info, you should try to get listed in the same places. BrightLocal also allows you to add notes and statuses to your various citations so you can more easily manage your campaigns.
Local Search Audit
Comprehensive tools almost always offer some kind of an audit feature. BrightLocal is no exception. In fact, it runs a complete Local SEO audit in minutes. Then, it offers actionable insights on 7 areas of your optimization efforts:
- On-site SEO
- Off-site SEO
- Search rankings
- Citations
- Google + local
- Social media
Each section has an overall score (Good, OK, Poor) as well as more granular info. Use the reports to highlight where you need to prioritize your Local SEO strategies. Then, put an action plan in place. If you’re running your own digital marketing agency, you can brand the audit reports and present them to clients.
GMB Audit BrightLocal will audit your GMB profile so you have a central place to view all your ranking signals, including:
- Citations
- Links
- Categories
- Domain Authority
- Review count
- Star rating
- Local phone and address usage
The tool will also show you a side-by-side comparison of your profile with a competitor’s profile. Use that info to determine where you need to improve to stand out in local search. BrightLocal also shows you a “citation matrix.” That lets you know where your competitors have citations and you don’t so you can fill in the gaps. Additionally, the tool will display categories used by the top-ranked businesses. Some of those categories might be relevant to your own business model and can help you boost visibility.
BrightLocal Bonus Features
Order Local Citation Via Brightlocal
Another service they offer is citations on a pay-to-play basis so they sell citations in bulk offerings. I’ll report that that may be the one aspect of BrightLocal I didn’t have a fantastic experience with. I did a bulk order of citations and it was just a little tricky, I’m sure they’ve improved the platform and the delivery as my order must have in 2016 and they did deliver and gave customer service. The challenge was just some of the platforms selected didn’t work for my my business some of and overall the delivery felt a bit clunky. They definitely did their best and I know they’ve improved the citation building service so I would say BrightLocal would be a good source for citation purchasing.
White Label SEO Ranking Reports
I find very helpful you can white label the reports you can send them a PDF with your agency name, this means my clients get great data without seeing exactly where it comes from. Additionally, you can also send them a clickable URL again white labeled — which will show reviews and loads of useful data. This is not a perfect tool to respond rapidly to reviews ,but it’s very good for tracking review growth and viewing an overall picture of your review puzzle. You can identifying or review sites that you should focus on etc. For you business specific citations, BrightLocal shows you the NAP errors for name, address, postal code zip, and it details the citations you’re missing from some of the most common and most most beneficial sites. Again you can purchase citations as needed from within the system.
Google My Business | Local SEO Integration
One of my favorite features is the integration with Google My Business allowing you to quickly see visitor data to your GMB page + data about how many photos you’ve uploaded, you can even compare that to your competitors Google My Business pages. For more social media oversight, you connect your Twitter and Facebook pages. Thorough is a word to describe BrightLocal, this is a very wide reaching tool. I know there are a lot of search & site audit tools out there now but this platform is really solid.
SEO Site Audit Tool
I like the way it gives you these poor, modest or good breakdowns for key site strength factors like links, ranks & local listings. You can use these inputs to pursue instant improvement in real time as you work gamify your SEO work flow! I’ve used this for on-site SEO and often see a broken link or 404 error which lines-up little little tasks to work on. Other SEO elements covered include sparse content pages and mobile loading performance! The subject site’s page by page is even included which shows you the HTTP and schema or if there is not an address on the page. Trust me, the the information is really bountiful with BrightLocal and yet it’s is highly user friendly.
Monitoring New Client Locations
The navigation of setting up a new location or new client is greatly simplified because of the smart Google My Business integration so if you’re already an owner or manager of a GMB account you can instantly initiate the process of setting up new locations.
There is then a little bit of work that follows, in particular with the rank check setting up the rank ranking report enabling you can see the rankings by position. This metric appears with inspiring (or depressing) up & down arrows from one report to the next. What is especially intuitive here is that you can change the comparison date points so you could set a an older date point and have a more favorable arrow result to showcase. We all know how SEO campaigns fluctuate so it might be really helpful to continue showing the growth from six months ago (or when your engagement began) because you’re showing this perpetual improvement so the client can grasp the search engine rankings & their breakdown Google Maps. Yahoo (snooze) is included and thankfully the option to exclude exists!
BrightLocal Review: Pricing
BrightLocal offers a variety of different pricing models, each with a different level of service. The lowest level of service is Single Business. That costs $29 per month and includes most of the goodies described in this article except the LeadGen widget and white-label reports. The next level of service is Multi Business. For $49 per month, you’ll get access to additional search ranking reports and more keywords per report. You can also use the LeadGen widget and produce white-label reports. For $79 per month, you get the SEO Pro level of service. That gives you everything in Multi Business plus more reports and full API access. As with most other services offered online, BrightLocal offers custom levels of service. You’ll have to contact the company to learn about how much a tailor-fit solution for your business would cost. Also, you can save money if you go annual rather than pay for the service on a month-to-month basis.
Pros & Cons
Current BrightLocal users are saying stuff about the product online. Some of it is good and some of it isn’t. First, the good:
- Great reporting
- Excellent support team
- Citation trackers are top-notch
- Company is always working to improve the app
- Affordable solution
- Provides businesses with quality citations
- Ability to track industry-specific keywords
- Easy-to-use interface
Now, the bad:
- Company is a victim of its own success as a growing community of users puts demand on system resources
- Running manual reports can be very slow
- Lacks the ability to customize emails sent out to clients with monthly reports
- LeadGen widget has tough limits with lower-priced plans
