What Is BrightLocal?
BrightLocal is a professional all-in-one SEO reporting platform intended specifically for local SEO data for single or multi-location businesses.
With their platform you can view all your local SEO data in a customized Location Dashboard:
- Track organic, local, and mobile rankings
- Audit citations and NAP
- Monitor online reviews and get alerts
- checkProduce SEO audits and sales reports
- checkClean-up and build local citations
- checkGoogle My Business audits
- checkGoogle Analytics and Social integration
All these separate tools come together and are presented in a single location that you can access through BrightLocal’s dashboard system.
Not only are all the tools combined into a single dashboard with a clean and intuitive interface, but it is all hosted directly on BrightLocal’s website.
This means you can track your business (or your client’s) SEO rankings across all the top search engines and for multiple locations so you can get an accurate read on how the sites are performing and what, if any, impact the changes you make have.
This allows you to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t and find areas you need to improve on.
Plus it just looks good and is user friendly.
Let’s go over the functionality of the services offered and why they’re useful.
Keyword Rank Tracker
I have tried dozens of rank trackers and can say BrightLocal is by far the most accurate for local and Google Map Pack rankings.
You will need to adjust your thinking though as BrightLocal shows your organic rankings with the map pack included.
An example is if you are ranking #2 organically then BrightLocal’s rank tracker will have you showing up #5 (3 map pack listings + 2 organic places = 5).
You can see in the below image for the keyword “midtown atlanta dental” a #1 red dot for map pack rankings and then #4 for organic rankings. Meaning they are #1 in the map pack and organic.
You can even track changes in rankings over time with this tool easily. This process can be automated to send you reports weekly straight to your inbox.
The rank tracking dashboard also allows you to assess your rankings across multiple search engines from specific search locations, so you can make sure you have accurate data from the locations that matter most to you or your client.
This makes it very easy to get a broad overview quickly of how your rankings look.
Furthermore, as is the case with many of BrightLocal’s tools, you can track how your competitors are faring as well – enabling you to make tactical decisions which will help you get a leg up over the competition.
The ability to track rankings by location(down to the zip code) enables you to see how your sites are performing locally and in nearby areas.
Google My Business Insights
I would venture to say 80% of calls to local business are from their GMB listing. So keeping your listing up to date and optimized is crucial to get more phone calls.
BrightLocal offers another tool to help you keep an eye on your Google My Business Listing’s performance as well as the performance of your competition.
BrightLocal’s Google My Business tracking also enables you to see detailed information on you and your competitors citations including how impactful each citation is, the number of citations for each listing, and how many reviews you and your competitors have.
The tool also allows you to see how you rank in comparison to your competitors as well as the factors involved in those rankings.
You can even check rankings for specific keywords of your choosing.
This way you can get a grasp on why you might be underperforming compared to the competition.
Controlling and monitoring your Google My Business profile can have a drastic impact on your listing’s SEO performance.
I personally have not found another tool which covers the GMB listing quite like BrightLocal does.
Review Tracker
Speaking of business listings on external sites – most of those sites also provide a way for users to submit reviews of your business or your client’s businesses.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to track these reviews as they come in – all in a single location?
Well, BrightLocal’s review tracking service offers just that functionality.
You can, at a glance, see your business’ total average rating across all relevant sites like Facebook, Google, and Yelp.
This allows you to get a sense of how the public feels about your business and enables you to respond to reviews when you deem it necessary.
Citation Tracker
Citations are essentially business listings on sites like Google Maps, Yelp, and Yellowpages.
They are sources where potential customers can access your business’ Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) information.
Tracking all the sites where you have or, sometimes, more importantly, don’t have NAP information listed can be incredibly valuable.
The citation audits can show you if these sites have incorrect or duplicate NAP information for your business – both of which can have a big impact on your site’s SEO performance.
The audits can also show you what your competitors are up to, so you can make sure your information is available in the same places – taking away any tactical advantage they might have over you or your client.
Citation Building
BrightLocal offers a citation building service which can take the tedious task of contacting each site yourself to create new or fix erroneous citations off of your hands.
Each submission is manual and reports will be generated so you can track the changes.
BrightLocal can even help you claim and verify local citations, so you have ownership of them and have the power to control what information is displayed – preventing others from publishing incorrect information.
This service is offered starting at $2 per site so you can use the tools to determine which sites have the most priority and then decide whether you want to go through the tedium yourself or have BrightLocal do it for you.
You can also push your data to thousands of online business directories, mobile apps, and mapping services worldwide by using their Aggregators submission service.
They handle the data distribution to important Local Data Aggregators who supply your data to a wide distribution network, allowing you to reach thousands of customer touch points.
- Neustar
- InfoUSA
- Acxiom
- checkFactual
Other BrightLocal Features
Local Search Audit– This is a great feature which can give you a full audit in minutes. It gives and easy to read summary of what you have right and what needs to be fixed on your website and online presence.
Google Analytics – You can sync Google Analytics to each account and will pull the data for easy viewing. It is definitely not as robust as going directly to Google Analytics but will give you the details you need while looking at other areas of your campaign.Social – You can also track both Facebook and Twitter. This is more to keep a pulse on your accounts and is not really a social media management tool.
Okay, great, BrightLocal does a lot of stuff for me, but how much is this all going to cost?
Bright Local Pricing
BrightLocal offers three tiers of monthly priced packages (you can opt to pay for any of them annually at a roughly 17% discount) as well as access to their citation building service that requires no monthly fee.
You can also sign up for a 14-day free trial to give the product a test run before committing to anything.
These three tiers are as follows:
Overview of BrightLocal Benefits
BrighttLocal integrates all your local SEO tools into a single, reliable platform that has all your bases covered. It gathers all the local SEO data you need, such as organic traffic, maps, and search rankings as well as reports like Google Local audit, competitor benchmark, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO. Integrations with Google Analytics, Facebook, and Twitter help provide you a clear picture of where your business is the social media landscape and what you can do to give your business traction to set a foothold and grow in the realm of social networking.
Being a Trusted Citation Partner for more than 1,000 SEO agencies is a clear indication that BrightLocal has all the right stuff when it comes local citation management. The platform helps you clean up and build citations for just $2 per website, as well as discover and maximize relationships with local sites that are wholly relevant to your business among other things.
Digital marketing agencies and SEO firms will definitely appreciate BrightLocal’s White-label online & PDF reporting for every location. That means you can add branding elements like logos and brand colors to your reports to give them a very corporate feel that your clients will love. You can also give them access to your HTML (online) reports so they can view the data and get insights as well. Or if you so choose, you have the power to control what data you want your clients to see.
