A local-SEO agency turned itself into software and grew into a $9 million-a-year business

Myles Anderson, BrightLocal's co-founder and CEO, spent his early career in media-planning agency roles before moving into business development at the UK's biggest commercial radio group, where he met his future co-founder Ed Eliot while integrating an online business directory into a network of regional radio websites. About 18 months later — and after an unrelated, failed foray into online dating — the two started BrightLocal as a digital marketing agency doing local SEO work for clients, using early tools like Google Places, Yelp, and Qype.

The agency said yes to every client it could land, but quickly outgrew what the two founders could do manually, and no dedicated local-SEO software existed yet — so they built their own internal tools, first just for themselves, then realized other marketers and agencies wanted the same thing. That realization was the pivot from agency to software-and-services company. Eleven years later, BrightLocal was serving more than 20,000 customers a year across 8 countries with a staff of 190.

Getting there was slow and expensive: after spending 2-3 months planning to launch a new tool every month, it actually took two years to ship the first four — six times longer than planned — while seed funding attempts with angel investors and VCs went nowhere. Anderson took a second job to pay himself while agency revenue funded development, working 16-hour days, six days a week for 18 months while raising three kids under five. In 2012, the business hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue, letting him quit the second job and go full-time; around the same time they built a development team in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a roughly 100-person services and support team in the Philippines that has retained nearly all of its original members.

Growth has leaned almost entirely on inbound demand: a 14-day, card-free free trial feeds a self-serve pipeline, and about 95% of customer acquisition comes through organic search and word of mouth, built on heavy content marketing — more than 20 original research projects a year, most notably the Local Consumer Review Survey running since 2012, which has drawn over 500,000 page views and 37,000 links and citations from outlets including CNBC, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, Fox News, and Fast Company. A free training platform, BrightLocal Academy, has been completed by more than 5,000 customers, and adding a dedicated phone support team helped cut logo churn from 4.5% to 3.2%.

BrightLocal has been profitable every year since 2012, averaging about 20% annual revenue growth to reach roughly $9 million a year, with 80% of profits reinvested into the business — including 16 new hires in the most recent 12 months — and revenue split roughly 60% SaaS subscriptions to 40% services.