BrightEdge

Love how this tool integrates with analytics, and is able to compare our keywords against a short list of our competitors.

It was a bit clunky to use when we first started working with it, but with the help from the Brightedge team, we were able to navigate through it. After a year of use, we are extremely happy with the results.

The main pro of BrightEdge over something like SEMrush is the ability to assign keywords to specific landing pages, and then track ranking of those specific pages. Additionally, they assign you a "success manager" who meets with you regularly to get the most out of the tool. Our success manager was great.

It's too expensive. At least 3x what we are paying for an alternative solution that we like better. The account managers do not honor your decisions, and will try to go above you if you want to leave. The [SENSITIVE CONTENT] even sent an email to my boss's boss, trying to argue that the marketing team is making a poor decision. The tool itself can be overwhelming and requires too much work to make the high cost worthwhile. The fact that they need to assign you a success partner to make sure you are using it, says a lot.

- It has a robust set of features - if they all worked correctly- Autopilot is in theory, a fantastic feature. - Opportunity forecasting would have been great, but due to the number of bugs it has, it was unusable- Data Cube, site auditing tools, content marketing tools are good, but not better than what SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, etc. have at a fraction of the cost

- At over $55,000/year, the only key features it has over SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs ended up not working at all. We were locked into a full year and still use SEMRush and Ahrefs. Waste of money!- How clunky and slow everything is. Power users hate the UI and it takes twice as long to use any of their core features- Lack of QA. - Very faulty keyword research tools with extremely inaccurate, buggy results- Autopilot integration was pretty bad. It ended up breaking our build and their internal teams had no clue how to fix it

Recommendations in the system based on keywords and preferred pages by keyword. Great site health audit check which lays out what needs to be fixed, by importance. (You can even assign value to to pages in Google Analytics, so you get a better idea of what to fix first.) Amazing team behind the product who is always looking for customer input to improve and add options. Assign specific tasks to people by function, such as assign a developer to fix a speed issue or assign a designer to add a meta description to a page. Track the progress of tasks assigned. System will auto mark something done when it detects a task is completed. Just an amazing product in so many ways. Training and certification cannot be beaten. My favorite part of Brightedge is that in the keyword analysis you can find high value, low competition keywords to write about. This helped us attain first page presence for some very high value keywords. We also used their help to start creating pages with Google Schema and had amazing results with that.

Their onboarding is excellent, yet it still takes some time to get used to the entire system of adding researching and adding keywords, mapping a keyword to a preferred page, and then getting and completing tasks. Once you understand it and get used to how it works, it is awesome. However you have to be extremely committed and spend quite a bit of time on a regular basis to make that happen.

There are two favorite features of Brightedge. The first is Brightedge content, which allows you to do keyword research and then write an optimized post from inside Brightedge. Not only will this content then live on your website, but you can also add custom calls to action for lead gen. This is a really helpful solution if you are using an enterprise CMS that isn't user friendly for regularly publishing content. The other feature that I really like is the in-depth reporting on keyword performance and the ability to see all of your SEO metrics in one view.

The actual product is average. The cons here definitely lay in the costs and customer support. For what you are charged per year, it is quite a hefty amount, and I'm confident that I could have achieved the same ROI on organic traffic from a cheaper tool. The second con is customer support. They have some wonderful account managers, and then there are some that miss the mark. The sub-par account managers have a hard time grasping bigger picture marketing and project management. While this isn't everyone, it is a gamble.