12 BrightLocal alternatives for local citation building
Reputation management is a non-negotiable component of digital marketing today, and when it comes to local businesses, local citation building plays a key role in getting SMBs in front of their target audiences. While BrightLocal is a well-known and widely used platform for local citation management, it's important to explore alternative options to ensure you're providing the best possible service to your clients.
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In this article, we'll dive into some of the top BrightLocal alternatives for local citation building and compare their features, pricing, and overall performance. Whatever your reason for checking out BrightLocal competitors, you’re sure to find a citation-building solution that meets your agency’s needs on this list.
Table of Contents
- What is BrightLocal?
- Why explore BrightLocal alternatives?
- 12 BrightLocal competitors to have on your radar
- Choosing a BrightLocal alternative
- Evaluating BrightLocal competitors
- Frequently asked questions
What is BrightLocal?
As its name implies, BrightLocal is a platform built with the needs of local businesses in mind. As a well-known local SEO platform, it offers a suite of tools and solutions to help local businesses improve their online visibility and drive more traffic to their websites.
With a focus on local search, BrightLocal’s products enable businesses to monitor their search engine rankings, track their performance across various directories and citation sites, and manage online reviews. With these tools, businesses can identify areas for improvement, monitor their progress, and manage their online reputation across multiple platforms.
One of the user-favorite features of BrightLocal is its ability to track the performance of individual business locations across various search engines and directories. This allows businesses to see how they're performing in specific local markets and make data-driven decisions to improve their online presence.
BrightLocal features
BrightLocal’s features include:
- Local Rank Tracker: This helps businesses understand their rankings in Google’s local 3-pack, organic search results, and Google map results
- Citation Tracker: Audit citations by scanning them for erroneous information, NAP (name, address, phone number) inaccuracies, and missing citations on websites where competitors are listed
- Citation Builder: Create citations on over 100 websites, clean them up as needed, and remove reputation-damaging duplicate citations
- SEO audit: Understand performance in local SEO and identify key issues to help drive decision making
- Google Business Profile and Analytics insights: Integrations with Google make it easy to see and interpret Google Analytics and GBP data within BrightLocal
- Geo-rankings: See how rankings vary at a granular geographic level
BrightLocal pricing
The BrightLocal features discussed above are available through any of their three tiers:
- Single Business: $29/mo
- Multi Business: $49/mo
- SEO Pro: $79/mo
Citation building can be added to any tier as a pay-as-you-go add-on. It can also be purchased on its own without a plan. Citation submissions cost:
- Standard: $3 per citation
- Purchased in bulk: $2 per citation
Why explore BrightLocal alternatives?
Although BrightLocal is a viable choice for managing your digital marketing needs, it's worth considering other options as there are several significant downsides to the platform. To make an informed decision, it's important to be aware of these potential drawbacks.
Cost structure
The BrightLocal pricing structure leaves a lot to be desired. The pay-as-you-go model means you have to pay for every single citation. Since Google favors businesses that have numerous consistent and up-to-date citations, the price of building them can add up. Pay-as-you-go pricing also makes it harder to accurately quote your clients. Users complain that it can be difficult to understand your exact costs up-front.
Confusing reporting
Another frequent user complaint is that BrightLocal’s reports are confusing or overwhelming and that it’s difficult to understand the data. Users even mention that the reports are sometimes just plain incorrect. Your job is much easier when you can hand over clear, informative reports to your clients to demonstrate your progress on citation building and local SEO more broadly. Several of BrightLocal’s competitors can generate high-quality and easy-to-understand reports, saving you and your clients a headache.
Difficult set-up
BrightLocal isn’t the most user-friendly citation-building solution on the market, with users complaining of running into issues during set-up or spending more time on set-up than anticipated. For a listings builder to effortlessly scale with your agency, it should be quick and pain-free to get started with. That way, your clients will be able to start using it with minimal help needed from your team.
Support limitations
Sometimes, BrightLocal’s support is fast and efficient. However, it can be spotty. Some users find that it takes weeks to get the support they need, which is far more than you ever want to keep your clients waiting. Ideally, you’ll want to look for a BrightLocal alternative with reliably excellent and accessible support.
Spotty integrations
One of BrightLocal’s selling features is its integration with Google Business Profile and Google Analytics, but users mention these integrations—particularly with the latter—to be imperfect. If Analytics data isn’t properly synching with BrightLocal, it won’t be of much use to users.
12 BrightLocal competitors to have on your radar
Fortunately, there are many worthy BrightLocal alternatives that effectively tackle the shortcomings of the platform's citation-building tool. We compiled a comprehensive list of 12 BrightLocal competitors that can empower your agency to provide exceptional local reputation management services, helping your clients meet their goals and bolstering your revenue in the process.
1. Vendasta
Vendasta’s local listings go far beyond basic listing building. This comprehensive platform offers a range of resellable and fully customizable listing management solutions to meet your business's requirements.
Customizable citation-building software
Vendasta's citation-building software, Listing Sync Pro, builds citations on hundreds of websites and databases, optimizing for web search and voice search. Not only can you ensure your clients are more discoverable online, but you can do it all with a solution that looks proprietary to your agency. Since it’s fully rebrandable and customizable, you determine exactly how you want the interface of your citation builder to look.
Instant updates
Vendasta's listing builder provides instant updates, ensuring that online citations stay accurate and up-to-date. There’s no need to deal with lulls during which inaccurate citations can impact SEO performance or appearance in the local 3-pack.
White-Label Listing Management Services
Vendasta's services extend beyond citation-building software to encompass white-label listings management. Rather than building out your in-house team, and dealing with the costs and risks associated with hiring, you can depend on a team of seasoned marketing strategists who will continue verifying and maintaining your clients' listings. By entrusting Vendasta's reliable white-label experts, you can be assured that your SMB clients' online reputation is in good hands, no matter how many local SEO clients you sign.
Broad Range of Digital Marketing Solutions
Through Vendasta’s marketplace, you'll have access to an extensive selection of digital marketing solutions for local SEO and beyond. Rather than dealing with numerous reseller vendors, you can find a variety of solutions for your agency all in one place, saving time and money and boosting productivity.
Pricing
Pricing for Listing Sync Pro and white-label listing management depends on which Venasta tier you are signed up for. While you don’t have to pay to access Vendasta’s marketplace of reseller solutions, you’ll get deeper wholesale discounts at higher tiers. These include:
- Essentials: $439/mo
- Professional: $939/mo
- Premium: $1969/mo
- Custom: $3879/mo
2. Synup
Synup is a platform aimed at helping businesses acquire more customers through a range of solutions. Listings management, a core offering of Synup, allows businesses to manage their online citations across over 200 websites. By making it easy for users to maintain their listings from a single dashboard rather than having to manage them manually, Synup helps businesses perform better in search and gain more traffic.
There are a few additional products in Synup’s local SEO toolkit to aid businesses in their local SEO and reputation management efforts. Agencies can help their SMB clients in their customer acquisition efforts through the use of these tools.
Pricing
To access Synup’s pricing, you’ll have to get in touch with them for a quote. While pricing isn’t public, users indicate that the Listings Management tool from Synup is priced starting at $30/month per location.
It’s always possible for the pricing to change without notice, given that it isn’t public. Variables such as the number of locations or specific features required may also impact the final price.
3. SOCi
SOCi is a marketing platform that focuses on serving multi-location businesses. The platform offers a range of products aimed at supporting businesses to improve their online visibility.
SOCI’s Listings product is a BrightLocal alternative that simplifies the listing management process for multi-location businesses. This product offers field-level approvals and permissions, making it easier to assign appropriate access to different roles in an organization. Managing permissions is a frequent pain point for multi-location SMBs, and SOCi’s Listings offers a workable solution.
Pricing
Since SOCi’s pricing isn’t publicly available on their site, you’ll have to contact them directly for pricing.
4. Moz Local
Moz is a familiar player to those who have spent some time in the SEO industry, thanks to its suite of software solutions. With dozens of tools designed to help SEOs do their jobs faster and more effectively, it deserves a spot on this list.
This BrightLocal alternative is Moz’s answer to reputation management and local SEO. The listing builder included in Moz Local is a dashboard from which users can clean up errors, remove duplicates, and auto-update local citations across the web. It also supports review management, another important component of reputation management.
Pricing
There are three Moz Local pricing tiers:
- Lite: $14/month per location
- Preferred: $20/month per location
- Elite: $33/month per location
To build citations on the full list of that Moz-partnered websites, you’ll have to subscribe to the Elite tier. More limited citation building is possible on the first two tiers.
5. Yext
Yext creates a suite of products and solutions to support marketers. Among these is Yext’s Listings Management solution, which can be used to quickly and effortlessly update listing information across more than 200 publishers in their publisher network, automatically suppressing duplicates in the process.
Its dual-sync integrations allow users to receive critical data and analytics from publishers. It can even be used to manage user-suggested updates to ensure problems, such as listing inconsistencies, don’t occur.
An important note about Yext: since it uses data overlays, listings are only updated for as long as you use Yext. Once you stop using the platform, listings either disappear or revert to default settings. This is sometimes referred to as renting rather than owning a listing and it’s worth knowing before signing up.
Pricing
Yext’s pricing isn’t public, so you’ll have to contact them for a quote. Yext has four plans to choose from: Base, Starter, Professional, and Ultimate.
6. Semrush
Many marketers will be familiar with Semrush thanks to its suite of SEO solutions, including link-building, keyword research, and competitive analysis. You may not think of them as a BrightLocal competitor, but they do in fact have a listing management tool.
Semrush can be used to create and optimize listings online. Conveniently, it also has multi-location functionality. This solution can even handle fields beyond the standard NAP data, such as image fields. Plus, reviews can also be managed through the same dashboard.
Pricing
Semrush’s Listing Management comes with the Semrush Local add-on. To use the add-on, you have to subscribe to an existing tier. The add-on is $20/month, and the tiers are:
- Pro: $119.95/month
- Guru: $229.95/month
- Business: $449.95/month
7. Birdeye
Particularly tech-proficient will appreciate BirdEye's public API, but even everyday users can benefit from this SEO platform’s many easy-to-use integrations. Birdeye's local listings management allows businesses to improve their SEO rankings and increase traffic by generating leads. Users can create listings on over 60 of the most important databases and websites. Whether your clients are single-location or multi-location businesses, BirdEye’s dashboard is an easy-to-use option for both. Plus, high-quality analytics can help users gauge the exact impact that their listings are having.
Pricing
Birdeye’s pricing is not publicly available on their website. Reach out to them directly for a quote and more information about their different tiers.
8. Reputation
This BrightLocal alternative can be used to create, manage, and update listings from an intuitive interface. In addition to the usual listing data, Reputation can be used to add rich content such as images and videos to listings. Users can also use Reputation to answer questions in listing Q&A sections, showcasing brand transparency and responsiveness.
Pricing
Pricing information isn’t publicly available on the Reputation website. Contact them for a quote.
9. Chatmeter
Chatmeter bills itself as a brand intelligence platform designed to help businesses achieve their goals when it comes to visibility, reputation management, and customer engagement. To that end, the Listings Management product from Chatmeter includes a convenient bulk editor and lets users find mistakes and duplicate listings. By improving listings, this BrightLocal alternative helps businesses climb the SERPs and, hopefully, land a coveted Google 3-pack spot.
Pricing
Chatmeter doesn’t currently list pricing publicly. To get a quote, reach out to them directly.
10. Whitespark
Whitespark's local SEO software offerings include Local Citation Finder, designed to make manual citation building easier by automating citation discovery and tracking existing local listings. Users can run a competitive analysis to spot their top citation-building opportunities and automatically generate a list of the best websites on which to manually create listings.
What makes Whitepsark a little different from the other BrightLocal alternatives on this list is that they also offer citation-building as a service. For users who don’t want to spend time on manual citations, Whitespark’s in-house team can manually audit, optimize, clean up, and build the most appropriate listings for each business. Whitespark claims having their team manually verify every listing does a better job of catching errors and duplicates than their automated competitors.
Pricing
Whitespark’s citation builder software is available in 5 tiers, depending on how many locations you have and how many listing searches you want to run per day:
- Free: $0/month
- Small Business: $33/month, billed annually
- Specialist: $41/month, billed annually
- Agency: $49/month, billed annually
- Enterprise: $124/month, billed annually
11. Thryv
Thryv is a business software solution that aims to combine a variety of apps and platforms into a single dashboard. Among these is Thryv’s online presence solution, which can be used to build listings on more than 40 of the most popular sites on the web. Conveniently, Google Business Profile can also be managed from the Thryv dashboard.
Pricing
Thryv’s pricing is based on your unique configuration of solutions. Contact them for more pricing on their Plus, Premium, and Unlimited tiers.
12. Uberall
Uberall’s CoreX Listings tool is designed to get customers through the door by helping businesses appear in Google’s local 3-pack. This listing of 3 local businesses that appears at the top right of location-based searches can have a significant impact on traffic—both digital and real—to businesses. With Uberall CoreX, users can optimize both for organic search and for this important piece of digital real estate.
Pricing
Pricing information isn’t public on Uberall’s website. Contact them for pricing on any of their three tiers: Get Found, Be Chosen, and Thrive.
Choosing a BrightLocal alternative
With 12 BrightLocal alternatives to choose from, the right choice will depend on your agency’s unique circumstances. Consider these important factors when deciding on which option to try:
- White-label: Both white-label citation-building software and white-label services come in handy for agencies that want to offer a custom-branded experience. These increase brand equity and make it easy to grow without the growing pains associated with hiring.
- Usability: Whether your in-house team will be using the citation builder of your choice, or your clients will use it directly, user-friendliness will make it easier for everyone to get the most out of it.
- Cost/benefit analysis: The best BrightLocal competitor isn’t necessarily the cheapest or the most expensive one. Instead, it should check all the boxes that you’re looking for feature-wise while fitting into your budget.
- Analytics: Having access to high-quality reports makes it easier to demonstrate the ROI you are creating for your clients, justifying their investment. Look for a solution that creates informative and easy-to-understand reports.
- Client needs: Your clients' particular needs should influence your analysis of BrightLocal alternatives. For example, clients with customer-facing businesses will require solutions that are more focused on driving foot traffic.
- Scalability: Choosing the right citation-building tool from the start means that you won’t have to shop around again when your agency grows. Look for a solution that can effortlessly scale with you.
Evaluating BrightLocal competitors
Once you’ve decided on a BrightLocal alternative, go through this list to determine if it’s the right choice for your organization.
Cost transparency
Whether you plan to use the citation builder in-house or you want to resell it at a markup, make sure you understand exactly how the pricing structure works, including any possible add-on fees that can eat into your profitability.
Portfolio of solutions
Citation building is only part of SEO success. Consider whether the solution you’re evaluating has access to more SEO and reputation management tools, such as review management.
Publishing partners
You may have noticed that there is quite a range of publishing partners across the 12 BrightLocal alternatives we discussed. Some have 40 partners, while others have over 200. While more is generally better when it comes to citation building, it’s essential that the biggies are included, such as Facebook, Google, Bing, and Yelp.
Frequently asked questions
What is BrightLocal?
BrightLocal is a platform that includes a suite of tools to help businesses succeed in local search, particularly through reputation management and citation building.
What is a listing management software?
Listing managing software is a solution to create and manage business listings online, ensuring they are accurate and up to date.
