BrightLocal vs. SE Ranking

I recently broke away from corporation gyms and decided to start my own personal training business in Plano, TX. Looking to expand my visibility in order to bring in new clients, I signed up for BrightLocal after taking a Udemy class on optimizing my Google Business Page. I have not even had BrightLocal for a week and I have already seen a tripling increase in views on my Google Business Page and an increase in the number of people who have reached out to me. I signed up for the citation builder campaign and the campaign isn't even finished. BrightLocal also set me up with a customer service executive named Becki who was absolutely lovely! She gave me lots of things to think about and action steps to take to further expand the reach of my business. I haven't even been with BrightLocal for a month and I'm already so grateful for them! I highly recommend them and their services to help you grow your business!

SE Ranking is on a good track when it comes to rank tracking. It displays a graph of your average position over time which is helpful and it can also help you when it comes to identifying some basic SEO issues with your website. It boasts as an all-around SEO tool, which it definitely isn't because it lacks a link database to be your go-to tool for everything SEO. Its UI is not optimized for ease of use, thus offering sub-par user experience. It has two different interfaces for different SEO tools which, I hope, they can incorporate into one.

Incentivized

• When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
• I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
• BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.

Incentivized

• Rank racking. It’s really important for us that the ranks are tracked accurately.
• Monitoring of changes made on the website. We’ve found this feature really useful.
• Reports. This includes auto reports and manuals. We can easily and quickly create reports to check our SEO progress month by month.

• BrightLocal can very difficult to communicate with, especially when it comes to reporting bugs / defects, and also when it comes to finding out whether they are working on those bugs.
• BrightLocal's reports, other then the ranking reports, have far too many bugs and they seem to either have little QA or poor QA practices, considering how many defects there are.

Incentivized

• I really don't think SE Ranking has many flaws. They are also rolling out an app at the moment - SE Ranking Pro - need to test that one.
• Some more video tutorials on the site on how to use some tools would be helpful.
• More in-system popups would be more helpful too.

Incentivized

They had a huge update recently and the platform is now even better. Although not all the tools are yet in the new design.

Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.

Incentivized

The support is great but they don't have 24/7 support. And time zones can also be an issue sometimes. On the other hand there are plenty of guides and videos around to get yourself started. I never really needed support for "big" issues. And the help I got was good enough.

Incentivized

We used to use RavenTools but left several years ago as we needed a software platform more geared towards Local SEO, which is exactly what BrightLocal specializes in. Both of these have multiple features and great reporting options, but in the end, BrightLocal offered more features for Local SEO and also offered better reporting for clients as the reports were very easy to read and understand.

Incentivized

SE Ranking was our choice based on the suite of features it offered compared to competitors as well as the # of projects you could manage. From a cost perspective, we feel it provides the most value for your money. Other SEO tools did not offer the lead generation features that SE Ranking offered as part of their monthly plan.

Incentivized

• Positive because it makes our local clients happy and want to renew with us.
• Positive for the price. I didn't manage the budget, but we were always happy to have the service so I know we were getting value from it.
• Positive to see local rankings up

Incentivized

• The website "health" report has allowed us to fix things that Google might find strange or cause us to lose rankings, which has been very helpful.
• It's given us more visibility into what exactly our SEO management company is doing and how they are performing, and if things are changing or not. It's very easy to see right from the dashboard.
• Being able to see how our competitors stack up against us has helped us know where to improve, what to focus on, and how to be even better.

Incentivized