BrightEdge
Is This Your Business?Author: Kaitlyn Short
Founded by Jim Yu and Lemuel Park in 2007, BrightEdge is a technology company that makes search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing software tools for in-house teams and digital marketing agencies.
The BrightEdge platform seeks to help with predictable planning, optimization, and measurement of your campaigns based on actual content performance. It helps transform and translate your internet content into solid business results: traffic, revenue, and customer engagement. If you want to improve your search rankings and get positive results from your SEO efforts, these are extremely important.
The BrightEdge SEO platform offers several different tools and features to help guide marketing strategies:
- ContentIQ - A site audit tool for any type of content. It can crawl millions of pages or any type of content. Helps to resolve site errors
- Data Cube - An SEO and keyword research tool that helps identify content gaps, poor performing content, and the top ranking content of your competitors
- Hyperlocal - Finds location-based search data in any cities or countries covered by Google’s search engine
- Intent Signal - Track and analyze marketing channel performance
- Keyword Reporting - Helps prioritize and screen high-value keywords for added organic traffic
- Opportunity Forecasting - Forecasts how SEO updates and following content recommendations will increase revenue
- Page Reporting - Analyze an identify your content to see what drives brand engagement and affects revenue
- Recommendations - Provides detailed SEO recommendations for improving your content’s ranking factors. Tasks can be assigned to different team members.
- Share of Voice - A keyword research tool that uncovers competitor keyword rankings and info. Helps a content writer build competitive articles for increased online visibility
- Site Report - Track and analyze marketing channel performance, how they drive website traffic, and what the most impactful content looks like
- StoryBuilder - A dashboard tool that visualizes marketing performance. It shows and connects content production and SEO updates to traffic conversions and ROI
To get an idea of the scale of this marketing company, here are a few stats:
- Offices in Chicago, Cleveland, Foster City, New York, London, Sydney, and Tokyo
- 350+ employees
- 1,650+ global clients, including more than half of the Fortune 100 and brands
Keep reading for pros and cons, plus BrightEdge reviews.
Top Ranked Companies
The Good
- Content Performance Marketing
- Data Cube
- StoryBuilder
- Integrations and Partnerships
BrightEdge is NOT a full-service digital marketing agency. It is a software platform that collects and analyzes a wide variety of data critical to successful internet marketing. Let's talk about a few software features.
Content Performance Marketing
By now, most companies understand that good quality content is necessary to attract search traffic, visitors to a website, and customers to products or services. With the influx of content continually flooding the internet, marketers need a way to develop a content strategy and gauge its performance.
BrightEdge software will highlight online marketing challenges through a three-part process that will assist with finding target demand, optimizing content, and then measuring your results.
Data Cube
One popular feature of the BrightEdge platform is called Data Cube. This tool uses artificial intelligence for on-demand research billions of pieces of data. It offers customizable recommendations, search opportunity forecasting, page reporting, and more at lightning fast speeds. The results will give you valuable insights that will help you make educated business decisions about how you should proceed. You will be able to identify strategic keywords, search terms, rich media and content that will, in turn, allow you to identify new opportunities and develop competitive strategies.
StoryBuilder
Another popular BrightEdge feature is called StoryBuilder. This tool helps visually tell the story and outcomes of your SEO efforts. It offers online dashboards which feature helpful, bright colored charts and reports.
StoryBuilder will also allow you to respond to queries and analyze real-time data while collecting valuable insights and trends.
Integrations and Partnerships
Are you wondering if BrightEdge will be able to work together with marketing tools or analytics platforms that you already use? Check out our list of programs, tools, and companies that BrightEdge partners with:
- Adobe Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Web Analytics
- Coremetrics
- Webtrends
- MajesticSEO
- Moz
The Bad
- Not a Service Provider
- Transparency
- Availability
- Suited for Larger Businesses
- Website Navigation
Not a Service Provider
BrightEdge is a software platform. Not a marketing agency. It doesn’t actually offer marketing services.
Its product offers tools to help marketers perform competitive analysis, understand actionable insights, and focus their strategy and efforts. They still have to do the “efforts.”
Just wanted to be totally clear about that.
Transparency
Unfortunately, BrightEdge pricing information isn’t available for public consumption, nor does the company disclose whether or not an ongoing contract is required.
However, many comments on public forums state that it is a bit pricey. Keep in mind that at the same time, the majority of customers are also very pleased with BrightEdge's services for the most part.
Interested customers must contact the BrightEdge team for a quote.
Availability
At this time, BrightEdge only offers its services in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Additionally, it only offers its services in English. No other languages or options are available.
Suited for Larger Businesses
BrightEdge is probably better suited for larger businesses or a marketing agency, due to the price and because of the workflow management features. These allow SEO tasks to be assigned to a user and tracked from within the platform. Smaller businesses or SMBs might not be set up to leverage this feature. They could end up paying for something they don’t need.
Website Navigation
We were very surprised at how difficult it was to find information on BrightEdge's website.
Yes, it has a lot of information, but it's all over the place and you have to repeatedly click and browse just to find answers. For a business of this caliber, the team really needs to revamp its site, with the user experience in mind, not just opportunities to optimize page content.
The Bottom Line
Although pricey, BrightEdge looks to be a fantastic service that combines SEO and business data into visually appealing reports that illustrate actionable recommendations for organic search growth.
We can definitely recommend BrightEdge; however, we encourage you to explore all your options before making any decisions. This powerful software would definitely benefit a digital marketing agency or a larger marketing team. However, it's not right for every situation. BrightEdge is more geared towards larger businesses with big marketing teams or an agency. Small businesses may not be able to fully utilize features within the software, and, therefore, would be paying for something they don't really need.
