There was a time when local SEO was easy. All you had to do was get a few citations, add a category to the Google Places page, and you were good to go. But now, competition has increased, and things have become a bit complicated. So, how can you ensure that you continue to have targeted traffic to your website?

The answer is local SEO.

Adding local SEO to your digital marketing strategy is more important than ever. Having an online presence is significant for your business, whether it is local or global.

If you have a small business but aren’t working on local SEO, you are missing out on many opportunities. In order to make the most of your local SEO, you need tools that can assist with engaging your audience and improving your performance. In this guide, we will provide you with the best 17 local SEO tools that you should check out:

Problem with manual listing management

Google is the biggest search engine in the world. However, this doesn’t mean that your website should be SEO optimized only for Google. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake made by many businesses which you must avoid at all costs. 

Even though Google My Business listings take up most of the local search real estate, you also have to focus on some additional spaces. This includes Apple Maps, Bing Places, MapQuest, and some other industry-specific directories. If you want to ensure the success of your local strategy, you have to keep these non-Google spaces in mind as well. 

By factoring in the scale, your business operates in and the bandwidth and budget available for research, creation, optimization, maintenance, and tackling reputation management on all these platforms, your local SEO will become more time-consuming and intense. This is why opting for manual listing management might not be the best course of action.

Use of Local SEO Tools

Thankfully, there is a multitude of local SEO options that you can use. In fact, with so many options, you might get confused and overwhelmed. How do you decide which SEO tool is right for you?

A great SEO tool is one that not only takes up the tedious work but also makes formulation and scaling of your strategy easier. In the right hands, it can cover everything, including keyword research, monitoring rankings, reputation management, citation and listing management, etc. Depending on the specific feature set of the product, here are some of the uses of a local SEO tool:

1. Online visibility

Since most people use search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to find information, local SEO is no longer an option but a necessity to remain competitive. When a customer makes a local search, they are more likely to make a purchase. If you increase your online visibility, your website traffic, foot traffic, and sales will increase as well.

In the case of local business results, there are a few factors that are taken into account by search engine algorithms. Some of the most significant factors include the search term used by the user, prominence, and distance from the user. Now, you cannot do much about factors like distance from the user. However, with local SEO, you can impact the relevance and prominence of your business. You can ensure that your business listings and content are complete as well as accurate for the targeted locations. Also, with online reputation management features, you can generate more reviews and increase your prominence in the search results.

2. Listing optimization

An online citation should at least include your basic business information, such as NAP. However, depending on your business, you can also include more information. For example, if you have a service-based business like a restaurant, you can add the menu, pricing, videos, and photos to your listening. It will improve the customer experience and the listing’s reliability.

3. Customer experience

When a consumer is searching for a nearby service or a product, they want accurate information. If your business listing has the wrong phone number, business hours, or address, they will get frustrated and won’t purchase your products. They might even end up leaving a negative review. With local SEO software, you can maintain accurate listings on your website, applications, and directories, improving the customer experience.

Common features of Local SEO Tools

With a local SEO product, you will have access to a wide range of features. Before you buy any of them, you have to consider which of these features will be beneficial for your business:

1. Rank tracking

This is an essential feature that helps understand how your location is performing on the search engines. Rank trackers will allow you to monitor the rankings of your website for specific keywords that have local intent. With this information, you will be able to create strategies that improve your rankings for any under-performing locations. Moreover, historical reports can help you analyze how your rankings have changed over time.

2. Listings Management

When a consumer is searching for a product or service near them, they can find the information of the business in the search engine itself. These citations or listings include the name, phone number, and address of your business. Even if your business isn’t claiming the listing, the search engine will populate the data on its own by scraping the web. Sometimes, this might end up with wrong information.

For listings management, you can get a citation finder to discover all your listings across different search engines, local directories, review sites, and social networks. This information is usually collected through the partnership of the seller with the citation finder. Having a local SEO platform will make it easy for you to create, manage, and update new citations.

3. Google My Business optimization

Optimizing your GMB profile can improve your local search rankings. GMB is a platform for managing your online presence in all Google products, including Google Maps and Google Search. With a local SEO tool, you can use the GMB optimization feature to schedule Google posts and manage your business listings and social media accounts.

4. Reputation management

A positive online reputation helps provide an improved search ranking. Even though a local SEO tool won’t guarantee that you will have hundreds of five-star reviews, the reputation builder feature can respond to customer reviews authentically and even solicit reviews from your customers. It can help review management across different websites and channels, including search engines, review sites, and social media.

5. Social media

When it comes to customer engagement, social media is an important channel that shouldn’t be ignored. When calculating the search results, search engines consider your social media as well. There are some SEO products that integrate with the social media platforms allowing you to manage your accounts, respond directly to the customers, and schedule content.

6. Dashboard and reporting

In order to measure the success of your local SEO strategy, you can use these products that offer data visualization and reports with a wide range of metrics. These insights can include online reputation, local citation score, ranking history, and social activity. 

17 Best Local SEO Tools

Keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io is a versatile tool that is easy to use, quick, cheaper and lets you filter by city. It is a great starting point for your business as it doesn’t require an existing local listing and can find related keywords. If you are a beginner with localized keyword research, this is the perfect tool for you. It can help small businesses as well as businesses with a multi-pronged digital strategy. 

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With this tool, you have keyword data that is specific to Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, and more. Its ability to drill down on search volume data and keywords and filter it using the city makes it a great SEO tool. You can use it to optimize your Google My Business and other listings, find ideal keyword targets and keep a close eye on performance data and real SERPs. If your aim is to only monitor the Google rankings or any data specific to Google My Business, this might not be the right tool for you.

The only issue is that it doesn’t have the finesse required for an expanding local business. Also, it doesn’t track rankings.

BiQ Cloud

BiQ Cloud is an SEO suite that not only democratized the pricing model but also allows you to scale as your business needs grow. So, you have to pay only for what you use. Because of the way it approaches granular cost control, this tool has managed to set itself apart from any other traditional SEO tool in the market. With products like Rank Intelligence, Rank Tracking, and Keyword Intelligence, and Content Intelligence, you are sure to rake in a lot of benefits.

Once you have entered the keyword, you will have over 35 languages and 100,000 locations to choose from. After selecting your preferred language and location, you will get keywords that are specific to what your targeted audience is searching for. This will help you create localized content and increase your site’s local visibility. BiQ will also teach you how you can dominate your niche and find the most valuable keywords. In case you are unsure of the keywords and don’t know which one to choose, you can sort their value. The keyword with the highest value will bring more traffic to your website.

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Semrush Listing Management Tool

With the Semrush Listing Management tool, it will be easier for you to add and update data about your business to the most prominent directories. Once these listings are live, you can also track and update them to ensure that they are unified and accurate across all the platforms. Through their data distribution feature, you will be able to share your business information on social media platforms as well.

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Another worth-noting feature of this tool is the local ranking heatmap that allows you to keep tabs on how well your SEO strategy is working. It allows you to track five keywords on the hyper-local level. Your rankings around a specific area are displayed in a heatmap. Semrush also offers listing management services that collect reviews on your business. You can respond to reviews on Facebook and Google My Business directly from your Semrush account. 

With this comprehensive local SEO tool, you will be able to determine how well your business ranking is in your target city and the local search performance of your business across the target cities. You can receive the location reports via email by configuring the tool. This way, you don’t even have to log into your Semrush account to stay on track.

BrightLocal

BrightLocal is a user-friendly marketing platform helping marketers deliver the best results to their clients. Also, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to use it. It offers a software tool for managing and monitoring GMB listings and a citing building service. There are three main services that you can use – citation building services, aggregator submissions, and local SEO tools. 

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With BrightLocal, you will be able to track local citations, find duplicate listings, identify new citation sites, and spot NAP issues easily. You will also be able to compare your local ranking factors and citations against competitors, find any gaps, and fix them. Another feature that makes BrightLocal such an amazing SEO tool is the automated GMB audit and local search that gives you a full report within a couple of minutes. Apart from this, you can customize your lead generation widget and implement it on your website easily. If you are looking to increase your online visibility, build citations, increase your online reputation, and boost local rankings, BrightLocal is the perfect platform for you. 

Moz Local

Moz Local is among the most popular SEO tools that have been in the business for more than ten years. It works for small as well as enterprise businesses by ensuring that your online listings are accurate and consistent. This helps in boosting your website’s visibility. When you use this tool, all you have to do is put together a listing one time. After that, the rest of the process will be automated by Moz. 

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Moz sends the listings data to all the major search engines, business aggregators, directories, and apps. If you want to edit your listing, you can simply log back into your Moz account and make the change. You won’t have to edit every single listing in each directory. Also, whenever you get any new reviews, you will receive alerts ensuring that you are able to send a reply to your customers on time. It syncs with your Google My Businesses so that you can respond to Google reviews directly. Apart from this, you will also get location-centric reports that help in tracking your growth and determining key customer interactions.

Yext

With Yext, you will have access to a wide range of solutions and products that can help you improve your local SEO. It integrates with several directories to make sure that your business data and information is up-to-date. 

One of the most popular local SEO tools offered by Yext is the Knowledge Manager. It is the single source of answers to the most common questions about your business. This includes store hours, staff details, promotions, and locations. Also, with Yext pages, you will have an easy system to update listings and ensure that they have accurate information. These pages are integrated with Knowledge Manager so that customers have enough information about your brand. 

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Another popular local SEO tool by Yext is Listings that allows you to take control of all the information about your business shared by you on digital services and search engines. This feature can be used for real-time as well as scheduled updates, finding listing improvement suggestions, integrations with other tools, and analytics. 

If you want to reach new customers, enhance your online visibility, and increase your sales with an all-in-one content marketing toolkit, Yext is the perfect solution for you.

LSIGraph

LSIGraph is another popular local SEO tool that helps you rank high by giving you access to LSI keywords. In their recent update, they offered better, personalized keywords to their users in order to get a higher ranking. The premium access gives you unlimited searches based on over 100,000 locations. There are also 45 languages for you to choose from. 

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Since it offers unlimited LSI keyword search 24/7, you have access to extensive data on keywords you need to get a higher ranking. You can also get search volume data of every LSI keyword for the past year. You can export the selected keywords as CSV & PDF files. This way, you don’t have to scribble them down in a notebook or make an extra document. 

Apart from this, you will also have access to Latent Semantic Value (LSV). It gives you the most valuable keyword for a higher ranking, especially the ones that can attract traffic that turns into leads. LSI Graph offers exclusive white-label reports as well, which allows you to customize your reports in the way you want to. 

Whitespark Local Citation Finder

Initially a web design agency, WhiteSpark now offers some of the best SEO software tools in the market that can help you with your local search marketing. The most popular tool offered by WhiteSpark is its Local Citation Finder that can help you find citation opportunities to improve your relevant local search rankings. You can get 3searches/day for free along with limited search results, which is perfect if you are still exploring the tool. 

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Another popular local SEO tool offered by Whitespark is the local rank tracker that uses your location to give you insights into your SEO performance. It helps you understand your ranking across search engines, your rank in different types of results, and your performance against your competitors. Unlike some other local SEO tools that are focused more on the technical aspects, Whitespark is focused on the business. 

You can also use the Reputation Builder tool that makes it easy for you to prompt customers via SMS or email to share a review. It also calculates your Net Promoter Score (NPS), which indicates the experience of your customers with your business. 

Grid My Business

Grid My Business is a local rank monitoring tool specializing in monitoring your ranking position on the search engine results. You can use this tool for discovering the position of your competitor on Google 3-pack. Having this knowledge will help you make adjustments to your local SEO strategy. 

Grid My Business offers an ingenious view to track positions by incorporating a grid view. You can use it to scan and monitor your local rankings around a specific location. You can also check and compare your Google My Business listing against the top local search results. 

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One of the main issues that Grid My Business deals with is the different rankings for the same keywords at different locations. With updated information, you can make modifications to your local SEO strategy and grab the top positions on the results. 

Apart from these, Grid My Business also offers customizable grid parameters, which means that you can select the preferred radius and size. You can discover your rank positions for several keywords in a specific location through bulk search queries. It also offers a side-by-side comparison view of your search ranking results over time so that you can compare and analyze them. 

SEOProfiler

SEOProfiler is another powerful local SEO tool that definitely deserves your attention and investment. It offers several features, including website page optimization, a website audit tool, a link disinfection tool for identifying bad backlinks, customizable PDF reports, and identifying strong local keywords. Apart from this, you get all the basic features as well, like keyword research, link management, uptime monitoring, link analysis, competitive intelligence, SEO audits, website analytics, and more.

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With SEOprofiler, you will be able to monitor your web pages’ position on Google, Yahoo, and Bing in several locations. When you are promoting your website using SEOprofiler, you don’t need any other tools. Also, since they offer white-label reports, you will be able to customize the reports as per your company’s design.

Needless to say, when you use SEOprofiler, you will get much more out of your investment. 

Local SEO Checklist

When it comes to fixing the technical local SEO issues, none does the job better than Local SEO Checklist. Powered by Synup, this is a free list detailing the different ways for you to optimize your website for search. Apart from this, this tool checks if your listing on Google My Business follows the right guidelines.

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With this tool, you will also be able to check whether your website has the correct schema markup for content or not. You can use this free scanning tool for auditing how your listing appears on about 48 different websites. 

Synup

Synup is a powerful all-in-one marketing software suite that has been specifically designed to help businesses with local SEO. With this all-in-one solution, you can monitor your analytics, create reports, and manage your listings. It has local SEO tools that offer niche-specific SEO.

Not only does it allow you to manage your listings, but it also ensures that they are synced across different search engines, directories, and apps. By using this solution, you will be able to integrate your data onto other sites in real-time within seconds. 

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Another great feature offered by Synup is its ability to crawl more than 200 local search engines and spot inconsistencies in your listings. If it does find any inconsistencies, it will send you a notification of the same. You will also receive notifications of a new review instantly. You can switch windows to respond to them immediately. Also, it helps in tracking your traffic, keyword rankings, competitor performance, and other factors.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a high-quality SEO tool created to help your business with link building. As you must know, link building is an integral part of local SEO strategy. But, it is also considered to be the most time-consuming. Creating high-quality links is daunting and difficult, especially with improved search engine algorithms. BuzzStream has been designed to ensure that you can create high-quality links quickly. In fact, it is currently one of the best tools for outreach linking available in the market.

This tool has been in the market for quite some time. However, the initial version had some drawbacks, which were fixed in the latest version. In this version, there is a new interface that is easy to use. It also comes with several new features that offer improved performance. It is an amazing tool to earn local backlinks.

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Buzzstream can also help you in identifying and building relationships with influencers in your local area. They will help drive the word-of-mouth traffic resulting in increased local awareness. It is also considered to be an effective tool for digital PR and content promotion.

GeoRanker

GeoRanker offers a wide range of SEO tools that help in finding local citations and tracking local search rankings. One of the most popular local search marketing tools offered by GeoRanker is the Local Citation Finder. With this, you will be able to create citations for your business on some of the best industry-specific websites and grow your business.

Another popular tool from GeoRanker is the Local Rank Checker & Tracker that checks the ranking of your website and shows you the exact position in real-time. The results are based on targeted locations, either countries or cities. It also offers the Keywords Density Tool that helps in measuring how many times a phrase or keyword has appeared in comparison to the total number of words on your web page. 

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All of these tools are available for free. However, there will be certain restrictions on usage. If you are planning to manage a lot of keywords and locations, you should upgrade to a paid plan.

LocalFalcon by dba

LocalFalcon is an immensely powerful tool for SEO, especially if you already know the terms you want to target. They offer hyper-local ranking data, something that you won’t get from the conventional keyword research tools. You can use this data for analyzing your local scratch landscape, guiding optimizations, evaluating the impact of these optimizations, and helping your business expand. 

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With this tool, you will be able to see full local GMB/Maps results. Through its map grids, you will have super granular real-life ranking data. Its built-in reporting feature offers ranking changes in time-lapse, which work great for the retrospective. Not only is it easy to use and quick, but it also connects to GMB easily. Apart from this, Local Falcon offers flexible pricing so that you can get exactly what you need without bearing any unnecessary expenses. All of these features are available at an affordable price which makes it the perfect tool for businesses of different sizes across a wide range of industries. 

GrowthBar

GrowthBar is a popular SEO tool through which you can get critical SEO metrics on any website and Google search results. It has a Google Chrome extension allowing you to do PPC analysis, backlink analysis, and keyword research without even leaving your browser. This multi-purpose SEO tool unlocks several SEO insights which can help you climb the local search rankings.

You can use GrowthBar for finding local keyword suggestions and identifying the best-performing keywords of your local competitor. For all the seed keywords, you will receive a ranking difficulty score. It will also create a detailed report that features the domain authority, estimated organic traffic per month, and the top organic keywords of your competitors. 

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GrowthBar will generate a detailed overview report featuring your local competitor’s top organic keywords, domain authority, and estimated organic traffic per month. With this data right at your fingertips, you will have the edge over your competitors, allowing you to outsmart them in local SERPs and have more local search visibility.

Google My Business

Want a better way to deal with your reviews on Google? Use Google My Business.

Google My Business is a one-stop-shop for managing how your business looks and performs in the search engine. With this tool, you will be able to adjust how your website shows in organic search results, Maps, and the Knowledge Graph. There are several factors used by Google My Business for determining rankings like distance, relevance, and prominence. 

In order to start with Google My Business, you have to claim your listing. Select a category that is accurate with the service you provide. Everything that you add has to be in line with the information available on your website. If you provide inaccurate information, it will kill your listing and ranking. Check your phone number and opening times carefully. You should also create citations on other websites like well-regarded review sites, directories, and well-regarded business listings.

So, if you want to make the most of your listings and get good rankings, maintaining your My business account should be your top priority.

Conclusion

We hope that now you know how important local SEO is and the different tools you can use to implement it. With these local SEO tools at your disposal, you can save a lot of time refining your online listings and maintaining your local SEO strategy with ease. Regardless of whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or an online one, you can use these tools for improving your business visibility, tracking metrics, and gaining more leads and conversions.

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