Why has BrightLocal changed the way Locations work?

What’s happened? 

We have made two important changes to the way Location's work within the BrightLocal platform:
 

1. You now need to choose a Location whenever you create a report or update an existing report which doesn’t already have a Location. Until you’ve chosen which Location to assign the report to, you won’t be able to run the report.
 

2. Each Location that you create in BrightLocal can only have one report of each type assigned to it.

For example, ‘Bill’s Burgers’ is permitted to have a Rank Checker report and a Citation Tracker report, but you can’t set up a second Rank Checker report and link it to the Location ‘Bill’s Burgers’. If you want to use the same business details in a second Rank Checker report you’ll need to create ‘Bill’s Burgers-2’, by duplicating* the existing Location.

Why have these changes happened? 

We’ve done this to simplify and streamline the way you gather data and insights and subsequently manage these within BrightLocal.

Requiring a Location when setting up or editing reports makes Location information and Settings the single source of truth — ultimately allowing you to control all business data from a single place in the BrightLocal dashboard. 

Everything in local SEO starts from a real world Location, with a business name, address and phone number, so it makes sense that a BrightLocal Location should replicate this and form the foundations of your data gathering in the BrightLocal platform. From here, you can build out areas of reporting, insights and analytics using the data and connections saved against that Location.

How does this affect my reports?

Now, if you’re setting up a new report or editing an existing report, you’ll need to select an existing Location from the dropdown or hit ‘Add New’ to create a brand new Location to link to your report.

Remember, only one report from each type of tool can be assigned to a Location, so you won’t be able to assign a second Rank Checker report to a Location which has already has one. 

What if I already have two reports of the same type assigned to a single Location?

Don’t worry, we’ll only ask you to change this if you need to edit either of the reports linked to that Location. They’ll run as normal until you edit one of them, though we’d obviously recommend assigning one report to one Location when you can.

To change the linked Location, simply select another Location from the dropdown, add a new Location or duplicate* the existing Location.