How BrightLocal became a
“game-changer” for Nifty Marketing

About Nifty Marketing

People tend to stay close to home when it comes to finding legal representation, so ensuring high local rankings is a necessity for law firms and lawyers. And with nearly 1.35 million registered lawyers in the United States, it’s no easy task to reach the top in local search.

That’s where Nifty Marketing comes in. Nifty Marketing is a marketing agency that specializes in digital marketing for law firms.

Nifty Marketing serves to help law firms rank higher, generate more clicks and calls, and win more clients.


Nifty Marketing services include SEO, paid advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, web design, and video production. Nifty helps law firms grow and has done so for nearly a decade. They work with everything from small solo practitioner law firms to large, full-service law firms.
“Accuracy and consistency were huge aspects of what we were looking for. We wanted to feel like the law firms we were presenting as ‘top performers’ were actually top performers”
Ryan Joos, Head of Business Development, Nifty Marketing

The Challenge

Nifty Marketing’s challenge was relatively common for a local marketing agency with a national client base:

How can you understand a client’s local marketing landscape when they’re located thousands of miles away?

Dig beneath the surface and there’s a lot more going on than simply being far removed from a client.

Firstly, there’s the need to get accurate data on a client’s ranking in their local market. Ranking reports based on national search results are meaningless if a local customer is not seeing the same results. 

The second part is understanding what is helping the highest-ranking law firms get ahead. Each local market is going to be made up of a different set of competitors which means there’s no copy-and-paste approach to success. 

Nifty Marketing had used other rank tracking systems before, but there were always questions around the accuracy of the data.  Nifty Marketing’s Head of Business Development, Ryan Joos, saw first-hand how this could erode client confidence:

“Clients would tell us that what the other tool was presenting was very different from the search results they were seeing. The client didn’t feel confident in the data, and nor did we.”

The Solution

When it came to seeking out a better solution, BrightLocal was the obvious choice.

“There were multiple people within our industry that we trusted and respected that were personally using BrightLocal” says Ryan.

BrightLocal gave Nifty Marketing exactly what they needed — the ability to analyze local marketing performance wherever a client was located, with pinpoint accuracy.

Using BrightLocal, Nifty Marketing was able to:

  • Run quick SEO audits for prospects to understand their current situation and spot opportunities to improve results.
  • Track rankings to see growth and trends during campaigns.
  • Integrate Google My Business, Google Analytics and other platforms to get a consolidated view of digital marketing performance.

The Results

BrightLocal is now a daily port of call for Nifty Marketing. 

The Location Summary dashboard gives the team a quick overview of each client’s performance. Everything they need is at their fingertips in one place: rankings, reviews, website traffic, Google My Business Insights, links, website authority, and more. 

“BrightLocal’s tools save us a significant amount of time” explains Ryan. “Being able to get high-level information quickly and accurately is very helpful for our project managers. This helps us keep stronger pulses on multiple campaigns easily.” 

Having visibility on all this data helps Nifty Marketing shape their strategy, spot trends, and react faster.

“If the client is seeing an increase or decrease in calls, traffic or leads, you can easily hop into BrightLocal to see what keywords are moving and how that might be impacting everything else,” says Ryan.

BrightLocal’s automated SEO audits are a big timesaver, too. Previously, audits were very manual, used multiple tools, and involved lots of screenshotting. Now the team can conduct SEO health checks and generate shareable reports twice as fast.

“Using BrightLocal has really streamlined our client-auditing process. We can more easily spot red flags, identify trends, and present solutions in less than half the time. It really has been a game-changer for us.”