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November 28, 2017Local 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:
- 88% 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)
- 50% of consumers who do a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day. Same with 34% of consumers who searched on a computer or tablet. (Go-Globe)
Not convinced yet? Check out the full list of local SEO stats and trends in this HubSpot Infographic here.
Why is Local SEO Critical to Your Business?
It doesn’t matter whether you are operating from one location or 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 a few weeks ago. 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.
You can download the PDF copy for free by signing up for our newsletter below or you can simply click here to check out the article.
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 7 best local SEO tools you should use to improve your local search rankings.
Top 7 Local SEO Tools
1. 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.
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 Moz Local:
- 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 tools in this list. You may have to spend anywhere between $99/year per listing to $249/year per listing, depending on your needs.
To see the full list of features for all three local SEO packages, click here.
Price: Starts at $99/year per listing
2. BrightLocal
Founded by Ed Eliot and Myles Anderson in 2009, BrightLocal is an all-in-one reporting platform for Local SEO. Their local SEO services are used by over 45,000 agencies, businesses, and freelances across 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 $29/month where you can monitor your business in up to 3 locations. BrightLocal offers a free 14-day trial as well where you can test out some of their key features.
For full comparison of the plans, check out this page.
Price: Starts at $29/month
Click here for a 14-day free trial
3. 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.
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: help 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
4. 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 planswhich 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
5. 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 rankings, traffic 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.
You can calculate your costs by clicking here.
Price: $30 per location per month
6. 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 $199/year.
Compare these packages here.
Price: Starts from $199/year
7. 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 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
Conclusion
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 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)
- Local SEO for Multiple Locations: Everything You Need to Know (SEMrush)
- How to Conduct a Local SEO Audit in 45 Minutes (Neil Patel)
- Top 19 Local SEO Tools To Improve Your Ranking (SEOPressor)
- 5 Simple Ways to Dominate Local Search (Search Engine Land)
This article was originally published on Sandeep Mallya’s inbound marketing blog, 99signals as “Local SEO Tools: 7 Best Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings“.
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