BrightLocal vs. SpyFu

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!

If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.

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

• Keeping a tab on competitors organic and inorganic activities
• Helps identify where the competitor is getting the backlinks from.
• Identify competitors top content and the keywords that's bringing them traffic
• Get proper information of their current and past ADS run on Google.

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

• As with any database, their keyword database has limits, so the data returned is relative to their database, not necessarily the full picture.
• When SpyFu database or scoring chances, the data provided can spike, thus causing confusion among stakeholders, we're reporting to.

Incentivized

Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.

SpyFu is an easy to use tool, and has a self -explanatroy dashborad to generate the data needed to provide insights into any B2B SEO and PPC campaign. It is not comprehensive, but it certainly provides good enough insight to make it a valuable part of any agency tool stack

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

SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.

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

I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.

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

• Helping us track our ranking.
• It helps solve the problem of ambiguity when it comes to Google Ads. It makes the strategy more clear.
• You can sift through lots of different online analytics to find the information, but it takes way too long. SpyFu has it all in one place!

Incentivized