Brightlocal Review – Local SEO Client Management Tool

What Is The Product?

In this Brightlocal review I’m going to break down what the tool is and why you should consider picking it up if you are doing local SEO for your clients.

Brightlocal is an all-in-one tool designed for SEO agencies, consultants or for local businesses to track and improve performance with local SEO campaigns. It offers tools such as rank tracking, citation tracking, review management, Google My Business optimization, website auditing and more. 

Brightlocal Review

Overall this tool is an awesome suite of tools designed for helping you rank businesses higher in the Google local map pack specifically for local businesses. 

Let’s discuss each of the tools included and some of the additional features that Brightlocal offers.

As soon as you login you have a main dashboard where you can manage your clients and locations for those clients. You can see an example of that here where this law firm has 2 locations:

Brightlocal will have you enter in your client’s business information so they can search for existing business listings and information about the business.

You also have a dashboard for each of those clients locations where you can manage all of the different reports and use tools specific to that location.

Let’s go through them.

Rank Tracking

You can enter keywords to track both organic and map pack rankings. Reports can be setup to run on any interval you want such as weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or otherwise.

As rankings are changed you will get notifications in the dashboard of either improved, neutral or dropped rankings. Overall the tool is very useful and in the years I’ve used Brightlocal It’s always been pretty good about tracking rankings, especially for the local map pack.

Here is a screenshot of the ranking dashboard:

Citation Tracking

Citations in my opinion is really just a fancy word to label ‘business listings’ such as Yelp, Google My Business, Yellowpages etc. If you have done any research about local SEO you will know that citations are very important for improving your rankings in the local map pack on Google.

Brightlocal allows you to track and audit existing citations as well as sources where you may be missing a citation. They even offer a service where you can get them fixed or created for you. Overall the tracking works pretty good but you will sometimes see it finds sources that are slightly off (assuming it’s the same business with an in-consistency).

You can use the citation audits to also determine what the top competitors have for citations based on a provided keyword. This is really powerful for matching your competitors and beating them at their own game by creating more high quality citations and improving existing ones to have the correct Name, Address and Phone (NAP) information.

Here is a screenshot of the citation tracking dashboard:

Review Tracking

Another awesome feature is the ability to track reviews for the business. If you set this feature up to re-run the report every week you can get a full glimpse into new reviews for the business across all kinds of different review sites. The major sites being Google, Yelp and Facebook among many others they can track for you.

The reporting shows you growth of the reviews over time and you can also filter the reviews from worst to best. You can even go in and respond to the reviews as needed.

Here is what the review dashboard looks like:

Google My Business Reporting

Having a fully optimized Google My Business page is going to be one of the most important ranking factors for ranking in the 3 pack. Luckily Brightlocal also provides a full in-depth overview of your Google My Business profile information, images and the keywords you wish to track in the local rankings.

You can also find information surrounding duplicate profiles, NAP problems, and other on-page SEO issues that could be negatively affecting your rankings.

Here is what the dashboard for this looks like:

Other Features

Local Search Audit – This is another awesome feature that more or less gives a small glance at all of the other features combined in one big summary. This is perfect for showing potential prospects the issues that exist with a website and perfect for closing local SEO deals.

Google Analytics – You can sync up a Google Analytics account which will simply just give you an additional way of viewing traffic metrics without actually logging into the analytics dashboard. This is a nice addition to all the other reports for clients.

Social – You can also track growth on both Facebook and Twitter for your client. This isn’t really a management tool for social media but more of an additional reporting tool they added in 2016.

Check out my full Brightlocal video review and walk through of the platform here:

What I Like About Brightlocal

The team at Brightlocal has been spending a lot of time improving the software over the years and it shows. It’s by far one of my favorite local SEO tools and for good reason!

Inside the software you get:

• Rank Tracking
• Website audits for local SEO and prospecting
• Review management
• Google My Business improvements
• Citation tracking and services to fix them
• Social media tracking with Twitter and Facebook
• Google Analytics integration
• Multiple client and location support
• Simple to use interface
• Whitelabel reports with your company (on pro plan or higher)
• Export reports in PDF or other formats
• Affordable pricing starting at $29.99/month
• And much more!

What I Don’t Like About Brightlocal

It has a recurring monthly fee, granted most any SEO tools these days have this I think it would be awesome if they had a one time plan that covered you for life. I’d even pay for something like this even if it was very expensive. I’m just not a fan of paying monthly for tools but the good thing is that the pricing is very affordable starting at just $29.99 for 3 locations which is plenty to get you started. 

Sometimes the data the tool pulls is for the wrong company and it just assumes a close enough match is correct. For example on citations sources or reviews for a given company. I think it would be better if they went through a confirmation process prior to just adding in random companies into the reports. It’s not hard to remove these it’s just no ideal when first running reports.

The citation services are very expensive for what they are. I’d suggest going with a provider like the Hoth or even Marketers Center for the best deal on getting your citations done. You can use the Brightlocal reports to get an audit and then get the citations done with other providers very easily.

Thanks for reading my Brightlocal review, if you enjoyed this review you should definitely consider signing up for the free 14 day trial Brightlocal offers!

Click Here To Start Your Free 14 Day Trial Of Brightlocal