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Local SEO Tools: 11 Best Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings

Sandeep Mallya — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 06:33:44 +0000

Local SEO has become more important than ever. As local competition heats up, the task of dominating local search results is taking precedence over every other marketing activity for small businesses.

If you run a small business, but are not too big on local SEO yet, these following stats should convince you otherwise:

46% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (BrightLocal)
18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day. (Google)
50% of local mobile searchers are looking for business information like a local address. (Go-Globe)

Not convinced yet? Check out the full list of local SEO stats and trends in this post here.

Why Local SEO is Important

It doesn’t matter whether you are operating from one location or a hundred, a strong local search presence is key to generating more leads and conversions for your business. As such, local SEO should be an important aspect of your overall SEO strategy.

The SEO tools listed in this article have one thing in common — they are geared towards optimizing the local search rankings of your website.

In order to test the following tools or truly appreciate what they do, it’s essential you have basic information about local SEO. It’s also important to know how it differs from traditional SEO.

Therefore, before we get started, I highly recommend you check out the Local SEO Checklist we published. This SEO checklist is especially useful if you don’t know much about local search optimization. It should help you gain a basic understanding of how local search works and to learn which parts of your website you should optimize for local searches.

Now let’s get back to the main topic which is improving your local SEO with reliable local SEO tools. The tools listed here can help you manage, track and optimize your local SEO efforts.

So here are the 11 best local SEO tools you should use to improve your local search rankings.

11 Best Local SEO Tools

1. BrightLocal

Founded by Ed Eliot and Myles Anderson in 2009, BrightLocal is an all-in-one local SEO software. Their local SEO reporting services are used by over 10,000 top brands, local businesses, and agencies around the world.

BrightLocal provides a host of local SEO features, including:

Audit Citation and NAP: Locate and monitor existing citations across thousands of sites.
Audit Google My Business (GMB): Get a fast, detailed audit of any GMB listing.
White-label Reporting: Easy to use client reporting system through a customizable dashboard.
Track Search Rankings: Track hundreds of keywords across Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Clean-up and Build Citations: BrightLocal’s team manually fixes and builds citations on over 1400+ sites.
Monitor Online Reviews: Monitor reviews across 20 sites including Facebook, GMB, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Foursquare.
Generate SEO Reports: Generate easy-to-read SEO reports.

The pricing starts from $39/month where you can monitor your business in 1 location. BrightLocal offers a free 14-day trial that lets you test out some of their key features.

For a full comparison of the plans, check out BrightLocal’s pricing page.

Price: Starts at $39/month

Click here for a 14-day free trial

2. Moz Local

Moz Local, developed by Moz, is perhaps the most popular local SEO tool in this list because of the reputation the company has built around search in the last decade.

Moz Local helps you boost the local visibility of your business and ensures that your business listings are correct, consistent, and visible across the web. When used the right way, you can really level up your local SEO strategy with Moz Local.

Among other things, Moz Local submits accurate location data of your business to all the major data aggregators and online directories and helps you close duplicate business listings and lets you easily update your business listings.

Here are some of the key features you’ll get access to when you sign up for this local SEO software:

Local Listings Dashboard: Manage, track, and optimize your online listings and gain key insights into their health and performance.
Instant Directory and Aggregator Submission: Moz Local distributes your listing information in real-time to the key directories and essential data aggregators.
Google My Business Sync: Moz Local enables you to claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing and sync any changes to your GMB profile.
Real-time Update Distribution: When you update basic or enhanced listing data, Moz Local automatically sends out that information across the Local Search ecosystem.
Distribution Reporting: Quickly assess the effectiveness of your published listings over time. Reported metrics include Average Score, Listing Reach, and Listing Accuracy. In addition to this, you’ll receive automated tracking PDF reports with weekly insights.
Review Monitoring: Monitor the latest reviews and ratings of your business on the most popular sites from one place.
Review Management for Google: In addition to viewing and reporting on all reviews, Moz Local enables you to respond to Google reviews directly.

In terms of pricing, Moz Local is reasonably priced compared to some of the other local SEO tools in this list. You may have to spend anywhere between $14/month to $33/month, depending on your needs.

To see the full list of features for all three local SEO packages, check out Moz Local’s pricing page.

Price: Starts at $14/mo

Sign up for Moz

3. Sitechecker

The Local Rank Tracker by Sitechecker is a specialized tool that lets you monitor your website’s keyword positions in local search results.

With this tool, you can check both current and historical data on how your site ranks on different search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo). Sitechecker also analyzes your website’s SEO performance in specific geographic locations and offers insights for both desktop and mobile searches.

Here are some of the key features of Sitechecker’s Local Rank Tracker:

Local SEO Focus: Features geolocation for regional customers and targeted performance analysis in specific cities or regions.
Current Position Checking: Tracks your current keyword ranking and compares it with your competitors.
Keyword Suggestions: Offers related keyword suggestions along with search volumes, helping you boost your organic rankings and expanding your website’s reach.
Mobile vs. Desktop Data: Provides separate tracking data for mobile and desktop searches.
Visibility Analysis: Offers valuable insights into both overall website visibility and individual page performance.

Price: Starts at $49/mo

Sign up for a 2-week trial of Sitechecker

4. Listing Management Tool by Semrush

Semrush’s Listing Management tool was developed in collaboration with Yext, a digital platform to manage your listings, reviews, and local pages. (see #10 for details)

Semrush’s Listing Management tool harnesses the Yext Knowledge Network to publish data across all the most popular directories and intelligent services, including Facebook, Google, Yelp, Bing, Amazon Alexa, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Yahoo, and many more.

By using Listing Management as your single centralized dashboard, you can update your information once and publish it where people are searching.

Just type in your business information in the search bar and click on ‘Check listings’.

Semrush will then present you with all of your listings and the status of each:

Image Source: Semrush

Next, proceed to payment and start leveraging the tool to boost your local SEO.

Paid subscribers of Semrush get to employ all of Yext’s Digital Knowledge Management capabilities for only $20 per location a month.

As of now, the Listing Management tool is only available for Semrush users in five countries — US, UK, Australia, Germany, and France.

Price: $129.95/mo for Semrush Pro (includes Listing Management tool)

Side note: Semrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that can help you with more than just local SEO. Read my full review of the software, or start your 14-day free trial to test it out for yourself!

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5. Serpstat Local SEO

Serpstat’s Local SEO tool allows you to manage your business presence and reputation in numerous local directories from a single interface in a matter of minutes. The list of directories includes Google Maps, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Uber, Yelp, BAIDU, Foursquare, and many more.

The key to successful local SEO is to explain to search engines how your business operates. With this tool, you can input the information, sync it across all directories, and keep it up-to-date with ease.

Here’s what you can do with Serpstat’s Local SEO tool:

Location profile: edit one location profile instead of separately editing each directory.
Synchronization: sync the data across dozens of local directories in a few clicks.
Location editing: update opening hours, products, services, menus, and other information.
Statistical analysis: track dynamics of clicks, impressions, photos views, and rating activity.
Manage reputation: talk to customers and reply to reviews. Engage in social media: post news, photos, and videos.

Price: $20 per location per month

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6. Whitespark

Founded by Local SEO expert Darren Shaw in 2005 as a web design agency, Whitespark is now a full-fledged local SEO company that provides tools and services to help businesses and agencies with local search marketing.

Whitespark’s Citation Finder tool is a widely popular tool used by several marketing agencies and businesses across the world. You can also use its Local Rank Tracker as your primary local SEO rank checker tool.

From building citations, to earning reviews, to tracking your rankings, to building high-quality backlinks, Whitespark helps you show up, win customers, and manage your local search.

Whitespark provides the following tools to manage and optimize your website for local searches:

Local Citation Finder: helps you find all the critical citation opportunities you’re missing, so you can increase your local search rankings.
Local Rank Tracker: allows you to monitor your local and organic search performance.
Reputation Builder: allows you to review your business on popular platforms and bring more business through the door.
Link Prospector: helps you automate your link prospecting and find more link building opportunities.

In addition to these, you can also access Whitespark’s free local SEO tools such as Review Handout Generator, Google Review Link Generator, and Offline Conversion Tracker.

There is no information on the pricing of their local SEO solutions on the website, so you’ll have to get in touch with their team on the contact page to get information on pricing.

According to this blog post by the founder Darren Shaw, the local SEO packages start from $100/location for up to 5 industry/local sites.

Price: Starts from $100/location

Visit Whitespark

7. Uberall

Uberall offers local listings management for enterprise brands and media agencies that require their business listings to be optimized for search throughout the whole local search ecosystem.

Through its data quality focused platform, Uberall is the leading provider of location data to the databases that power the navigation and mapping industry.

Through years of experience in the location marketing domain, Uberall has acquired strategic relationships with all the principal map development companies, including Google, TomTom, Apple, and HERE. Uberall is currently trusted by over 500 companies and has published over 600,000 businesses on the map.

Uberall’s local marketing solutions include:

Google My Business Management: Uberall’s deeply embedded relationship with Google’s GMB location content platform makes update your listings fast and easy.
Local Listings Management: Uberall’s Local Listings Management removes bad business listings from the eco-system to ensure that only the most accurate local listings data is presented at the moment of search.
Local Data Optimization: With Location Data Optimization, Uberall prevents errors from occurring in how your business is listed and syndicated across the web.
Local Search: With Uberall’s powerful platform, you can ensure that your listings are claimed, verified and optimized for local search so they will rank high in the map search results.

Click here to request a free demo of Uberall

8. GeoRanker

GeoRanker has a collection of local SEO tools that can help you find local citations and track your local search rankings.

GeoRanker provides the following local search marketing tools to help grow your business:

Local Citation Finder: GeoRanker creates citations for your business on the best websites for your industry.
Local Rank Checker & Tracker: This tool checks the website ranking and shows exactly the position in real-time for the targeted locations, either cities or countries.
Keywords Density Tool: This tool helps with the measurement of the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a web page.

While the above tools can be used for free, there are certain usage restrictions. So if you manage a lot of locations and keywords, you’ll need to upgrade to any of their paid plans which start from $99/month.

You can compare the features of these plans here.

Price: Starts with $99/month

Get started with a free trial of GeoRanker here

9. Synup

Synup is a local SEO software that allows you to see how your business is doing on the most important local directories, search engines, and review sites. Synup’s technology suite powers over 55,000 local businesses.

Here are some of the features Synup provides:

Location Management: makes managing your location super easy.
Crawl All Listings: crawls 200+ local search engines and directories to catch data inconsistencies.
Instant-Sync: syncs your business and location data across different sites.
Niche Specific: allows you to manage industry and niche-specific sites.
Monitor Interactions: allows you to get instant notifications when customers leave a review or social comment.
Respond Back: integrated workflow allows you to respond back to reviews from within the tool.
Analytics: lets you automatically track web traffic, keyword rankings, and more.
Widgets: allows you to use widgets to display your location and reputation data anywhere.

Since it’s so effective, it’s also expensive. You’ll need to pay a minimum of $30/location per month.

Price: $30 per location per month

10. Yext

Yext listings, pages, and reviews help businesses around the globe facilitate face-to-face interactions that boost brand awareness, drive traffic, and increase sales.

Yext uses the following tools:

Data Cleansing: Yext will clean up the facts about your business across all your internal data sources, keeping it consistent within your organization, so you can be fully confident in the information you provide to customers.
Duplicate Listing Suppression: This tool will solve the problem of duplicate business listings once and for all.
Google My Business Management: Yext’s integration with Google My Business will ensure that you can make your updates directly through the platform, then publish to GMB at any time.
Local Pages: Yext Pages are optimized to show up in search engines, so your mobile customers can quickly find relevant, accurate data about your nearest locations.
Listings Management: Yext is directly integrated with a large set of maps, apps, search engines, and social networks, so your locations perform better in search and your customers find you at the moment of decision.

Yext is not as expensive as some of the other local SEO services in this list. For the starter plan, you’ll have to pay $4/week.

Compare Yext Local SEO’s packages here.

Price: Starts from $4/week

Visit Yext

11. Local SEO Checklist

If you find any of the above tools too expensive to invest in, then you should try Local SEO Checklist. This free Local Search Optimization tool, powered by Synup, offers 40 different options that detail specific SEO tasks to help you optimize your site for local search rankings.

You can use this free tool as your Local SEO guide to know exactly what parts of your site you need to optimize for local searches.

In addition to the checklist, you can also access the following free resources:

Schema Scanner: find out whether you have relevant schema marked up content and get a list of pages that do not have schema installed.
Google Checker: Use this tool to see if your business listing meets Google My Business guidelines.
Small Business Checklist: Small Business Checklist is a comprehensive list of common tasks that all aspiring entrepreneurs must do in order to materialize their business idea.

Price: Free

Visit Local SEO Checklist

Summary (and additional Local SEO resources)

The above tools should help you optimize your website for local searches and ensure that you stay one step ahead of your local competition.

While these SEO analysis tools are good for boosting your local search rankings, you’ll need to use them in conjunction with other keyword research and link building tools to make sure that the overall SEO of your site is in place. If you need further information on what SEO tools you should be using, check out these links below:

Recommended Local SEO Resources

Local SEO is a vast subject; so I’m sharing links below to some of the most helpful resources you can find online on the topic.

Local Search Ranking Factors (Moz)
Google Maps Marketing Guide for Ranking in Local Search (Nightwatch)
Local SEO for Multiple Locations: Everything You Need to Know (Semrush)
The Definitive Guide to Local SEO (Neil Patel)
Top 14 Local SEO Tools To Improve Your Ranking (SEOPressor)

If you found this article useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

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Note: This article was originally published in September 2017 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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Local SEO Checklist: Boost Your Local Business SEO

Sandeep Mallya — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 09:06:13 +0000

The importance of optimizing your business for local search has grown significantly in the last two years. More and more people are using their mobile devices to search for local businesses online.

By optimizing your website for Local SEO, you can help your business stand out in search engine result pages (SERPs) and help attract new customers to your business.

But what is local SEO? And what differentiates local SEO from traditional SEO?

Moz defines local SEO as follows:

“Local SEO is specialized online marketing that increases visibility for businesses interested in ranking for geographically related keywords. A large component of local SEO is ranking well in the local algorithms. It is also important to rank well in the organic results for local keywords.”

One of the main differences between local SEO and traditional SEO is how you target customers. Location of the searcher plays a key factor in local SEO. Therefore, you must keep geography in mind while optimizing your website for local SEO.

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If your website doesn’t show up when people search for your keywords in your location, you could be losing out on a lot of potential customers. Local SEO can fix this problem for you. It takes time and effort to optimize your website for local SEO, but it’s completely worth it.

Here’s a complete local SEO checklist to help you get started with local SEO.

Local SEO: Your Website

Your website lies at the center of your overall digital presence, as illustrated in local search expert Mike Blumenthal’s graphic below.

Image Courtesy: Moz

Local SEO starts from optimizing your website. Other factors such as customer reviews, citations, and your social media presence become less impactful if your website isn’t optimized for local SEO.

Here’s a local SEO guide for optimizing your website.

Create a ‘contact’ and ‘about’ page on your website.
On the contact page, include the complete name of your business, address, phone number (NAP), and email address.
Ensure that your phone number is clickable via mobile.
Ensure that your contact details are consistent everywhere they are mentioned on the website.
If you operate from just one location, list your address and email address in the website’s footer.
Add a Google Map to your contact page to make it easier for prospects to find you.
Sign up for Google My Business (GMB) and verify your website.
Make your website 100% mobile-friendly.
If you operate from multiple locations, each location should have its own dedicated page.
Use Schema structured data markup to help Google more easily identify your local business. If you use WordPress, download this plugin.
Perform weekly site audits using tools such as SEMrush or Serpstat to fix all SEO errors.

Local SEO: Customer Reviews and Ratings

Customer reviews play an important role in local SEO. It’s important to monitor the online reviews for your business. If you operate in a niche that gets few reviews, then you know one or two reviews can ruin your company’s reputation. Reviews and ratings can also reward your website with additional traffic.

Have testimonials from your existing customers published on your website.
List your business on Google My Business (GMB).
If your business already has a GMB listing, ask your existing customers to post reviews and ratings on Google. These reviews will show up in the SERPs when someone searches for your business on Google.
Add photos to your GMB profile.
Respond to negative reviews on GMB, if any.
List your business on Yelp.
List your business on Foursquare.
List your business on Bing Places.
Ask your customers to post reviews on your Facebook business page.
Don’t ask for too many reviews at once. A sudden influx of reviews may be treated as spam on certain platforms.
Don’t pay for fake reviews.
Treat review acquisition as an ongoing process.

Local SEO: Content

High-quality content attracts high-quality backlinks and improves your search rankings. Content and backlinks are two most important ranking factors on google. Therefore, it’s necessary that you have a local content strategy for your website.

Make sure your most important content is featured on, or at least linked to, the home page.
Optimize title tags and meta descriptions with localized keywords (“Yoga Studio Bangalore” instead of just “Yoga Studio”).
Delete any duplicate content on your website. Use a tool like SEMrush to identify duplicate pages on your site. Use the canonical URL tags wherever necessary.
Utilize testimonials from customers in your service cities to make your city landing pages unique.
Use unique testimonials from customers who have used specific products or services for related product and service pages.
Include local photos and videos (optimized with relevant keywords) to enrich and complement the content.
Host or sponsor events in your city.
Use tools such as Buzzsumo or Google Trends to identify and curate trending content in your location.
Write blog posts on topics that apply to a certain demographic or location.

Local SEO: Social Media

Using social media to build local brand awareness is critical if you want to have an advantage over your local competitors. Follow these guidelines below to make sure your social media business pages are optimized for local SEO.

Create a solid presence on all the popular social media channels.
Claim a profile for your business on every major social media platform.
Create a robust social media strategy.
Post photos on your Google My Business (GMB) profile.
Monitor social media conversations. Respond to negative feedback.
Maintain a social media content calendar and post content on a regular basis.
Enable reviews on your Facebook business page and ask your existing customers to post reviews and ratings.
Share user generated content (UGC) on your social media pages.

Local SEO: Citations

Citations are complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website (NAP+W) anywhere on the web. Businesses with greater number of citations tend to rank higher in SERPs than businesses with fewer citations. Local citations are also important to validate that a business is part of a community.

Manual citations: Manual citations take time and effort, but ultimately you have more control over your business listings. To learn more about manual citations, check out this guide from Moz.
Automated citations: Automated citations can help you save time and effort. The main drawback of automated citations is that not all services are of equal quality and you have less control over your business listings.
Use a third party tool like MozLocal or BrightLocal for local listings and citations.
Make basic duplicate listing detection on a variety of platforms easier with the use of a free tool like Moz Check Listing.

Conclusion

Local SEO has several elements that are different from traditional SEO. Now that you have a local SEO checklist, you can start optimizing your website for local SEO and reach out to new local customers.

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