BrightLocal vs. WebCEO

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 are just wanting to have a web page without any idea of wanting to gain exposure for it via Google or social media channels then WebCEO is probably not for you. However, if you are like me and my Graceful Touch blog project where building a stronger and stronger backbone of digital success is important to you then WebCEO is without question your number one place to go.

• 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

• The support team at WEB CEO are probably one of the best we have come across! They are always on the ball and answer all and any questions we have within a quick timeframe!
• The on-page optimisations and page scores go quite in depth allowing you to understand what is holding a page back. You can also customise what you want the on-page optimisations to be. There are settings to turn off a ranking factor, extremely handy for certain projects!
• The internal link structure analysis is extremely useful to help see your most authoritative pages. This enables you to help direct your links to your most important pages and see what pages are linked together.

• 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

• We are very happy with WebCEO and they are always responsive and have implemented many of our team's recommendations. Most recently we have suggested they work on a system that would allow for factoring whether a ranking was a local stack, organic, answer box, and provide an at a glance rating. Something like 1-1-1, where each dash would signify a first page ranking, so first dash would be answer box, next local stack, next organic, etc...

Incentivized

Unlike many of the other SEO analysis tools on this list, which focus primarily on your site’s SEO activities, Web CEO digs deeper into company’s online marketing strategy including email campaign, shortened URL service, creating landing page for webinars, social media push activities.

The UI is awesome and the recently redesigned the entire product. This isn't like Hootsuite which stays stagnant for years. It looks modern and functions like a modern tool. It can be a little sluggish at times but that is partially due to it querying so much amazing data at once :)

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

Most support networks focus on answering questions as WebCEO does. With my experience with WebCEO, I now call those the average support providers. Then there are the exceptional support providers who really go to the next level in making sure you are taken care of. While WebCEO certainly does this I've decided to remove them from qualifying at this level. Instead, I made a whole new category for their support called extraordinarily amazing. They respond in a timely fashion. Offer great value along the way. But then even have fun what with their unnecessary but great graphics that they include in their support. This is the upper edge of everything and leaves me with a huge smile on my face.

No. The difficulties were much of our own making. The installation of the software was simple and trouble free but our own initial use was less straightforward and we did not thoroughly think through how certain aspects of the system would be used. Thus we had initial inconsistency between different users of the system, which had to be resolved later.

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 used to use IBP which is a very good tool but after many years I found that the benefits of WebCEO's online tools were able to outperform the results that we were getting with other tools. By moving to WebCEO we are able to reduce time spent on individual tasks and use the data compiled to quickly implement solutions on our clients' sites.

• 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

• I would say that as a tool. Web CEO has a decent amount of kick to it. I just think that it is lacking that knockout punch that its competitors have
• The social metrics and competitor metrics are great, they just don#t have that zing to them. I think some GUI tweaks would move Web CEO onto the next level. It is a pity, as Web CEO is one step from greatness.

Incentivized