BrightLocal Review – Is This SEO And Local Citation Tool Right For You?

BrightLocal focuses on arguably the most important and often overlooked part of your business, your local relationships. Even as most companies shift online and expand to national or even international clients and customers, you can undervalue the importance of local business connections. 

Of course, brick and mortars know just how important this. But eCommerce and digital service providers should also embrace just how much revenue they can drive from their backyard. 

BrightLocal is a local SEO suite that helps you do just that. Named after Brighton UK, where it’s from, this suite of tools combines SEO, reputation management, rank tracking, and more under one convenient and easy-to-use dashboard. 

There’s a lot to like about this tool, especially for marketers who may be managing SEO and campaigns on behalf of businesses. It’s also very affordable with plans starting from $29/month. 

Is BrightLocal what you need to better manage your local campaigns? Find out in this ultimate BrightLocal review. 

What Is BrightLocal? 

BrightLocal’s mission is straightforward. They’re here to “make local marketing simple.” They do this as an integrated SEO, citation, and reputation management platform. It includes all the features you need to increase your local visibility to attract local customers. 

BrightLocal has been around since 2008. Originally a product of the UK, they now support the US, Canada, Australia, and fifteen other countries. Currently, 90,000+ SMEs, marketers, and agencies use the software. 

In addition to local SEO tools, BrightLocal also offers excellent aggregator submission and citation building to help your business or client transform from a small mention here and there to a thriving hub. 

That’s why BrightLocal boldly stands by their claim that they are everything you need to dominate local search. 

BrightLocal Features

• Competitor Analysis
• Dashboard
• Google Analytics Integration
• Keyword Research Tools
• Keyword Tracking
• White-label service for SEO agencies & resellers
• Automated online ordering – no clunky CSV or email
• On-Site SEO
• Off-Site SEO
• Search Rankings 
• Competitor Analysis
• Content Management
• Dashboard
• Google Analytics Integration
• Localization
• Mobile Keywords
• Rank Tracking

Getting Started With BrightLocal

BrightLocal offers a 14-day no credit card required free trial. To check out the web-based software, provide your name, email, and set an account password.

After this, you can begin configuring your account. What’s really cool about BrightLocal is that if you already have Google My Business Listing, you can pull that during setup, so you don’t have to manually find your business and enter the data yourself. 

After the initial setup and linking Google Analytics/other accounts, you’ll be taken to your dashboard. 

Here you’ll get an excellent snapshot of your SEO health, Google Rankings, and Citations. You have various other tabs to check out, including rank tracking, social manager, and everything else you need to polish your local results. 

Overall, it’s really intuitive, especially for marketers with experience managing SEO. For newbies and SMEs, there are tons of onboarding tools to help you figure out how to use it too. 

BrightLocal Pricing

After your 14-day free trial ends, you can choose to upgrade to stick around for a paid plan. BrightLocal has flexible pricing beginning at $29. The biggest difference in the plans is the number of businesses you can manage. 

The Single Business plan at $29 actually allows you to manage three locations and get access to most features except white-label reports and the LeadGen widget. BrightLocal defines locations as distinctly separate listings. This means it could be three different business or three company branches. 

The Multi Business $49/month plan includes these features and support for up to six locations and API access. 

SEO Pro boosts you up to 100 locations for $79/month and competitor analysis. 

BrightLocal also includes an $8/month Just Reviews plan to help you generate, monitor, and showcase review. 

The three main plans also include an annual discount of two months free. Overall, BrightLocal is a pretty sweet deal since the SEO tools they offer alone cost around that much compared to their competitors. But we’ll go into more detail about this later. 

BrightLocal Features 

BrightLocal is packed with features. In addition to SEO and local citation management, you can also connect Facebook and Twitter, conduct rank tracking, and more. Here are a few things you’ll find useful with BrightLocal: 

1. Citation Building 

This is one of the reasons you opt for BrightLocal vs. a standard SEO Tool. Citations are an online reference to your business. Usually, they include name, address, and phone number, and other relevant details. For local businesses, especially brick and mortars, they are essential. 

BrightLocal helps you increase these citations by: 

• Manually checking your listing to make sure they are accurate 
• Building new citations where they don’t exist 
• Distributing your business information to local aggregators 
• Creating Google My Business and Bing local listings 
• Removing harmful duplicate citations 

BrightLocal does all of this for you. And you still have the choice of where you’re listed or not. Data aggregator listing is also super helpful to improve DA and web presence in key places like Acxiom, InfoUSA, and Factual. 

They also optimize your listing for local search. Overall, this is where BrightLocal gives you a huge bang for your buck! 

2. Citation Tracker 

The Citation Tracker makes it easy to spot inconsistencies with your Name, Address, and Phone number, to help you fix issues that hurt your local search ranking. 

It also helps you spot duplicate listings, which can help you and even spy on your competitors by showing their local listings. In addition, you can add notes to help you manage your campaigns. 

3. Reputation Manager 

We all know the damage that even one bad review can do. The reputation manager lets you instantly track reviews from a wide variety of sources, including Google, Booking.com, Zillow, and many more. Whatever your niche is, BrightLocal likely has the relevant platform for it. 

You’ll be able to monitor, respond, and showcase reviews. This is really important. For example, if you receive a low score review, you can reach out and see if there’s any way to get it raised to respond to the customer quickly so other users can get the full picture. 

4. Lead Generation 

This is handy for marketers. BrightLocal’s LeadGen widget helps you convert visitors into clients. You can create a personalized branded search audit for websites, contact forms, panels, and popups. 

And you can manage all your leads from within the dashboard to help your focus on the best prospects.

5. SEO And Rank Tracking

Rounding out what you can do with BrightLocal are solid SEO and Rank Tracking tools to help you better take care of SEO and do what it takes to rank more highly. You can create keyword groups, track competitors, and do everything else you’d expect from an SEO tool.  

All of this is done under the context of a Local Search Audit, which gives you a complete picture of what your competitors’ strategy looks like so you can emulate it for your own. 

Who Should Use BrightLocal? 

BrightLocal ticks all the right boxes. It’s affordable, feature-rich, easy-to-use, and can deliver real results. We highly recommend it for any company looking to do more business locally. While brick and mortar are the most obvious candidate for who would benefit from BrightLocal, the tools are useful for a wide array of business types. 

Even if you deliver your goods or services 100%, wouldn’t it be great to have more customers/clients in your local community? 

This is what BrightLocal does best. You may have nailed it on your global audience, now BrightLocal can help you take things back home. 

Is BrightLocal Worth It? 

Absolutely. Each individual BrightLocal feature is worth the starting $30/month. Between rank tracking, competitor analysis, SEO, reputation management, and more, you could easily spend over $100/month to cover all of these bases. 

In addition to being very affordable, it’s also user-friendly, has an excellent UI, and it delivers real results. With their Citation Builder, you can clearly chart all the wins. The same also goes for every other feature. 

Whether you’re an SME, marketer, or agency, this tool is definitely worth it. 

Pros

• Easy to use 
• Excellent UI 
• Wide array of features 
• Includes manual citation building
• Can easily track your online reputation 
• Excellent support team 
• Product is always improving
• Provides actionable insights to help you improve 
• Includes agency tools like LeadGen and white-label reports 
• Even includes FB and Twitter tools 

Cons

• Running some reports can be slow 
• Would be nice if it could send custom emails with reports 

BrightLocal Alternatives

While there are a ton of SEO tools on the market, from Mangools to Ubersuggest, there are few that focus on the local niche and include citation/reputation management features. When looking into BrightLocal, you’ll also see Yext. 

Yext is a location management software that automatically updates listings to ensure accuracy. It is quick to use and includes review monitoring. But you’re locked in an expensive yearly plan, and it doesn’t include as many great features as BrightLocal. 

Moz Local has a lot of overlapping functionality as BrightLocal. And it’s from one of the biggest names in SEO. The only downside is that it also locks you into a yearly plan. It’s affordable, but if you want to test the local SEO waters before committing, you’re better off with something like BrightLocal to start with. 

BrightLocal: The Bottom Line

If you want to improve your reputation, capture more leads, and grow your brand locally, then there are few tools better suited for the task than BrightLocal. See what BrightLocal can help you achieve and give the free trial a shot now.