BrightLocal vs. Serpstat

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!

Recently switching domains provided a lot of headaches for our marketing team. However, with Serpstat we were able to locate all our broken links and contact all the editors to be able to update our link. This alone took us from a DR of 25 to 34. Another practical use was for researching keyword volume for our on-page SEO - title tags and meta descriptions. With Serpstat we were able to determine keywords were worthy of us using in these values.

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

• Keyword data provided for multiple sites: this is a standard feature in lots of SEO toolsets. It's not the worst, but not the best.
• Backlink data: the link data is ok, but suffers from the same issue as the keyword data. If you pay for 100 results per report, expect ONLY 100.
• Rank tracking: the rank tracking is also standard. It does a good job of benchmarking progress.

Incentivized

• 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

• The daily query limit is sometimes frustrating.
• For a new person the menu system could be a bit confusing along with terminology, it would be great if there was little help icons next to each selection to help you better understand what they do.

Incentivized

I am very happy with the program and their services.

Incentivized

Serpstat is great to use on the desktop. Being able to get around the site is easy, and using tools such as rank tracking and filtering are intuitive if you’ve used other SEO software. However, their app is not mobile friendly. I do a lot of my work on mobile when traveling or when dad’ing, and it would be much appreciated for the the app to have better mobile UI functionality. I know I’m dreaming, but other SEO software I use is able to accomplish this.

Things like filtering and how powerful it is are not aa easy to understand until you watch some tutorial videos. I think making this feature more intuitive would also help the sites early on adoption from new users.

Incentivized

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

I believe I've only contacted support once because I had a question about access to a feature, and they told me it wasn't available on the plan I was on. No big deal, they were polite and prompt to respond and answered my question to my satisfaction. I haven't had any real issues with the software, so I haven't needed much in the way of support outside of that question, but I have no reason to believe their support wouldn't be helpful in more pressing situations.

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

We chose Serpstat over other SEO tools because of its an all-in-one toolset as well as having a clean, easy to use UI. The price point was also a deciding factor since we were able to do the majority of our SEO research using a single tool with a single monthly subscription.

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

• Serpstat has allowed us to confidently suggest keywords and SEO friendly updates to clients to implement
• Serpstat reporting has saved us time when delivering reports to clients
• Serpstat app integrations allows our other data sources and Serpstat data to be combined to create Reportz (app) for client delivery
• Serpstat is one of the first places I go to check organic words for content ideas and places to improve our SEO

Incentivized