Why Is BrightLocal Essential For SEO Success?

In this advanced world, BrightLocal is used to show up in local searches for businesses. This nifty platform is like a Swiss Army knife for local SEO, helping agencies and brands boost their visibility in local search results and manage their online reputation. It is your local SEO assistant. It’s packed with tools help businesses climb those local search rankings. Most agencies and brands trust on this app for their local markets.

Key Features

SEO Audits and Reports: It acts like a detective, digging into your local SEO setup and giving you a clear picture of what’s working and what needs fixing. It creates easy-to-understand reports that show your progress over time.

Citation Building and Management: Citations are like online business cards. This application helps you create and manage these listings across various platforms, ensuring your business info is consistent and up-to-date everywhere.

Review Management: Online reviews can make or break a business. It keeps an eye on your reviews across different sites, helps you respond to them, and even encourages happy customers to leave more positive feedback.

Rank Tracking: Want to know how well you’re showing up in local searches? BrightLocal tracks your rankings for important keywords, showing you how you stack up against competitors.

Local Search Grid: This cool tool gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your business appears in searches across different locations in your target area.

Pros

• Easy to Use: It has a user-friendly interface for new users. You don’t need to be a tech wizard to figure it out.
• Helpful Support Team: If you get stuck, customer support gets high marks for being responsive and knowledgeable.
• Great For Agencies: If you manage SEO for multiple clients, this app makes it easier to keep track of everything in one place.
• Training Resources: Users appreciate the educational materials that is provided by it, it also helps them level up their local SEO skills.

Cons

• Learning Curve: While generally user-friendly, some features might take a bit of time to master.
• Occasional Bugs: A few users reported running into glitches now and then.
• Data Loading: Sometimes, pulling up data can be a tad slow.

Key Uses Cases

Local SEO Checkups: It helps you spot and fix issues holding back your local search performance.

Listing Management: Keep your business info consistent across the web without the headache of updating each site manually.

Ranking Watch: See how well you’re doing in local searches and track your progress over time.

Client Reporting: Agencies love how easy it is to generate professional reports for their clients.

Review Monitoring: Keep tabs on what people are saying about your business online and respond promptly.

How Can You Improve Rankings With BrightLocal?

For your business Google Business profile is necessary. It is really important for that relevance factor and this is because Google gets a lot of information about your business from the Google business profile. Google can also surface your Google business profile in search results. Such as in the local search pack which if you’re unfamiliar is when the top three ranking businesses for a relevant search term appear at the top of a results page typically accompanied by their Google business profile when it comes to optimizations. There are a few things that we can check.

GBP Audit

Firstly is the Google business profile claimed and verified are we using the correct website URL provided are the name address and phone number details.  Correct have we got the correct opening hours listed and are we using relevant photography of the business. We can get a snapshot of some of the most recent reviews from our Google business profile and we can check. If we have  got any suspected duplicates for the Google business profile. If you aren’t aware duplicate profiles can actually be quite harmful so we had want to get them taken care of it. In this case we can do a comparison of the name address and phone number details provided in bright local versus what’s currently live on the listing. 

So we can highlight any discrepancies we might want to go ahead and just to note here Google is intuitive enough to recognize form in in the address and phone numbers.  For example Street and St Google understand they’re the same thing with country code formatting for the phone number essentially. If we can drop both addresses into Google Maps get a pin at the same place or we can ring through both phone numbers and get through to the same line.  Please rest assured Google will understand they’re the same. 

How to Monitor and Fix Business Listing Errors?

However any small optimization is ultimately going to give you a better chance of ranking locally so we want to check.  For example is the city name used in the landing page’s title tag is the state present within the landing Page’s title tag. Just some small things we want to ensure to give us the best chance of standing out to Google finally on the Google business profile audit. 

• We can input up to five keywords and again start to bench Mark, how we’re performing for these keywords against our top competitors.  For example, for Law Firm we can see the top-ranking competitors and again start to compare some metrics and identify how we might actually be able to outrank them for that keyword.

Citation Tracker

• Next we are going to look at citations and we have a couple of tools in BrightLocal surrounding citations. We have the citation tracker and the citation Builder. When working with citations typically this is managed on a spreadsheet and as you can imagine. This can very quickly become convoluted and the citation tracker is going to make it much more easy.
• In this way this report will pull all your existing listings into one place and starts to highlight any suspected name address and phone number errors or even any duplicates. The citation Builder on the other hand is a Brightlocal service where we’ll go and fix citations for you or even create new citations.

• We can even remove harmful duplicates but before we get into citation Builder I’d always first suggest running a citation tracker report to see the current state of your listings.
• On the citation tracker report the first page key citations list and this is a list generated by this tool based on the location and business category to help identify what exactly are the top directories which ones are we really going to want to focus on and prioritize.

Reputation Manager Tool

The reputation manager tool reviews are really important for that prominence Factor but also relevance. If your services and products are being mentioned throughout review text we break the reputation manager down into three main sections.

1. Monitor Reviews
2. Get Reviews
3. Showcase Reviews

Monitor Reviews

The Monitor Section gives us an overview of our reviews and a summary that includes the average star rating. The number of reviews and an idea of our review growth or our review frequency over time. Under the review tab we can see a list of all of the reviews that have been pulled in from the connected Source sites. We can go and view that review on that review directory and there we can respond to it. When we come back into Brightlocal we can mark the status of that review. So whether we’re working on that by ourselves or with a member of a team.

We can really keep track of our work here should we connect the Google business profile and or Facebook.  Here we can actually respond to those reviews from directly within this report and make use of additional features such as our review response templates or we can generate review responses via the magic of AI.

Get Reviews

The Get Reviews is all about being proactive about building our review count. Our average star rating hopefully and increases the frequency of our reviews. The three things that Google looks for as reviews as a ranking factor. So here we can start a review generation campaign, we can use an existing template, if we’ve already set one up or we can create a new template. Duplicate them, edit them, however, you need should create a new template.  We can see that we have got a couple of options. We can either ask for internal feedback with a public review or just ask for a public review. It really is down to preference here. However please note we can’t prevent a customer from leaving a public review. That does unfortunately go against Google’s guidelines so either way they’re going to have that option for that public review.

Next we need to build that template so we just need to give it a name, we can apply our logo, can choose exactly which type of internal feedback. We had like to acquire whether that be an NPS score a thumbs up or thumbs down or even a five star rating.  Next we can determine what exactly we decide is a positive or negative review and we can enable or disable that additional feedback or only include it for negative reviews.  For example next we can begin to format what exactly that review journey is going to look like for the customer on the left.

Showcase Reviews

The reputation manager is Showcase reviews. Here we have the option to display reviews on our website by the following methods list widget carousel, widget or if you’re particularly techy the raw JSON feed. You can edit the reviews are being displayed on the widgets by clicking edit widget or create. If you have yet to set one up here we can see a list of all of our reviews from our monitor review report and we can select the position that we’d like them to appear in the widget or we can utilize the Auto Select review features with several filters. As we only want five-star reviews from the last seven days from a particular review Source site.

Next we can play around with the design and format of the widget by either using one of our design presets or playing around with the layout container text or even review options. We are happy with our widget we then need to copy the code into the HTML of our website and that widget will integrate seamlessly with our business website. As we have discussed how we can optimize our Google business profile, how we can manage and build citations and how we can monitor get and showcase our reviews.

FAQs

Conclusion

BrightLocal stands out as a powerful ally for businesses and agencies looking to conquer local search. Its comprehensive toolset, user-friendly interface, and stellar customer support make it a top choice in the local SEO world. While there might be a slight learning curve for some features, the potential benefits far outweigh this minor hurdle. For agencies juggling multiple clients or businesses aiming to boost their local online presence, it offers a streamlined solution to many common local SEO challenges. From auditing and improving your local SEO to managing online listings and tracking your progress, this software provides the tools you need to shine in local search results. As with any tool, it’s worth taking advantage of their free trial to see if it’s the right fit for your specific needs. With its strong track record and positive user feedback, BrightLocal could be just the boost your local SEO efforts need.