Best Local SEO Tools
Best Local SEO Tools
Local SEO is essential for small businesses looking to attract customers to their brick-and-mortar store. Learn more about how these local SEO tools can help strengthen your business's digital marketing strategy.
It’s a common fallacy that search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t important for small businesses, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Especially for small, local businesses, online rankings are essential to being discovered by potential customers or clients. By enhancing their online visibility in local search results, small businesses can increase traffic to their website and help bring in more foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores.
Still, local SEO is tricky — there is a lot more competition out there than you may realize and getting your business to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs) or appear in directories requires a deliberate (and diligently executed) local SEO strategy.
What Goes Into Local SEO?
- Managing citations on local listings and review sites
- Supporting content marketing
- Building a social media presence
- Conducting local keyword research
- Tracking rankings on SERPs
- Monitoring local competitors
The following local SEO tools can help you track your rankings, monitor reviews, manage content, and more to improve local search visibility.
Looking for SEO services? Search for leading SEO companies on The Manifest.
Best Local SEO Tools For Your Small Business
Consider using these local SEO software tools to support your business's local SEO efforts.
- Semrush Listing Management Tool
- Semrush Position Tracking Tool
- Brightlocal
- Moz Local
- Synup
- Yext
- Whitespark
- Georanker
- Growthbar
- Google Business Profile/ Google My Business
- BiQ
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
Semrush Listing Management Tool
Semrush is a SaaS platform that provides several tools that companies can leverage to improve their SEO and content strategies.
Their listing management tool helps keep track and manage local citations, or online mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP).
What Are Local Citations?
Local citations can include business directories, websites, and apps. These listings are important for small businesses because it helps potential customers find them online. By keeping track of these mentions, small local businesses can do a better job managing their reputation, increase traffic to their site, and ultimately, increase the likelihood of potential buyers visiting their brick-and-mortar store. Additionally, these citations act as backlinks to a company’s website, helping build domain authority.
Semrush’s listing management tool allows small local businesses to add and update data to business listings, monitor customer reviews, and measure search performance in target regions.
Semrush Position Tracking Tool
Semrush also offers a position tracking tool that allows companies to track custom keywords in various geographic locations.
In addition to tracking keyword positions, companies can track their visibility and estimated traffic in a given region. When critical keywords change position, Semrush can send your marketing team a notification, alerting them to take action.
Brightlocal
When they’re first getting started, users with a Brightlocal account provide information on their business, such as their location. Then they are able to select from a list of citation sources and data aggregators to send their information across multiple websites.
Once their accounts are set up, they are able to track local citations, find duplicate listings, identify new citation sites, and monitor their name, address, and phone number.
This software service also automates Google My Business (GMB) audits and can provide full reports in just a few minutes.
As a bonus, Brightlocal offers a customizable lead generation widget for SEO companies. Widgets are dynamic and functional website features that are always present in a user’s view. They’re particularly valuable to website owners because it’s a great way to engage with users.
Brightlocal’s widget allows visitors to request a free SEO audit report using Google Places API. However, to view their report, they have to provide contact details to generate leads.
Moz Local
Moz is one of the most well-known software brands in SEO. They provide tools to support rank tracking, keyword research, site audits, and link analysis.
Source
One of their most popular SEO features is Moz Local — it is another citation tool that scans the web for mentions of your brand. However, it also grades the listing accuracy and flags missing information to encourage users to update their business info.
Synup
Synup is an AI-powered marketing platform that specifically helps local businesses optimize for search engines. It analyzes a business’s market to bring traffic to their website, monitors analytics, create reports, and manage business listings.
In fact, it can crawl over 200 search engines to identify and notify businesses of inconsistencies in business listings.
To support local SEO, their products help businesses with reputation management and building their online presence.
Yext
Yext integrates with local directories to help companies update their information. One Yext tool acts a single source of information for your business so business owners can feel confident that their online information is right.
By updating business information, you ensure that potential buyers that are looking for your company online get the information they need to become customers.
Whitespark
In addition to providing a citation tracker, Whitespark offers a local rank tracker that uses a business’s location to provide information about a local business’s website performance.
For digital marketing, it can help companies keep track of their keyword rankings across search engines and how they stack up against their competitors. It even keeps track of how a business’s website performs in different types of search results, such as Google Maps, Google Reviews, Images, and more.
Finally, Whitespark offers another tool to support review management. It helps companies prompt users to leave a review either through SMS or email marketing updates. These reviews help promote a business’s brand, build credibility, and improve their business reputation.
Georanker
Georanker provides several free tools including a local citation finder, a local rank checker and tracker, as well as a keyword density tool.
The keyword density tool helps companies measure how many times keyword or key phrase appears on a web page in order to optimize the page for search while preventing keyword stuffing.
Growthbar
Growthbar is a Chrome extension that provides SEO metrics on website performance and Google search results. It also can be used to analyze backlinks, conduct keyword research, and analyze PPC efforts.
It is particularly valuable for analyzing your local competitors. For instance, it can help identify what keywords other companies in your industry are ranking for, what their domain authority is, and an estimate of their organic traffic. With this information, business leaders can create a local SEO strategy that gives them an edge over their competitors.
Google My Business
It’s very important for local businesses to create a Google Business Profile because it helps customers in your area find your information online. As most buying processes start with an online search, it’s imperative that information on your business is accurate on search engine results pages.
A GMB profile will show where your business is located, your operating hours, contact information, what services and products you offer, and link back to your website.
By claiming you GMB listing, you can manage your information to make sure it’s accurate. Additionally, it will help your website appear in organic search results, maps, and on Google’s Knowledge Graph.
BiQ Cloud
BiQ Cloud is a scalable online SEO tool that can support rank tracking and keyword intelligence. In fact, it can track over 1,000 keywords rank and allow users to view how their site ranks in real-time.
However, it is particularly great for content optimization thanks to its rank intelligence tool. This feature can help companies find gaps in their content and generate ideas to support your online marketing strategies.
Unlike other tools, BiQ allows users to just pay for what they need, helping marketers keep their costs low.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google’s keyword planner was originally designed to support Google Ads, but it has become one of the most valuable keyword research tools for SEO. Many digital marketers rely on the keyword planner to discover new relevant keywords, view monthly searches, forecast search volume, and determine how keywords fit into different categories.
For those focused on local SEO, Google Ads Keyword Planner is a great tool because users can find keyword search volumes for specific states or cities. This is the perfect way to identify which keywords to target if you are focused on reaching potential buyers in your area.
The drawback of using the keyword planner, however, is that users have to have a Google Ads account.
These Local SEO Tools Will Strengthen Your Online Visibility
Small businesses need to invest in local SEO to attract new customers to their website and storefronts. By optimizing for local search, they can rank higher on SERPs, appear in knowledge graphs, and be found on Google Maps. As a result, they will have much better online visibility.
These SEO tools have several features to help local businesses optimize their website and update citations. They can even help with keyword research, rank tracking, content development, and managing link profiles.
Regardless of what your local SEO strategy entails, these resources can help you grow your business online.
Additional Reading:
- 4 Key SEO Elements to Include on Your Website
- Top 5 SEO Strategies for Small Businesses
- How to Avoid Keyword Research Mistakes on Google
Hannah Hicklen
Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Clutch, Clutch