An online presence is highly valuable for every business, no matter if you are located in a single place or have lots of offices around the globe. And search engine optimization should be applied both locally and globally.
Businesses that want to optimize for local SEO should have all the necessary tools and knowledge to fulfill their goal. Now more than ever, Google is focused on offering a personalized experience for each user thus local optimization plays a crucial part in the play.
For that, you need mostly tools and all sorts of local SEO strategies to get to your clients, even if you’re on the other part of the world. All the local SEO software listed in this article have one thing in common – to help you optimize your local search rankings for your website.
- cognitiveSEO
- BrightLocal SEO
- Yext
- Whitespark
- Synup
- Local SEO Checklist
- Reputation.com
- Moz Local
- Tribe Local
- Advice Local
We’ve gathered a list of 10 local SEO tools. Each one of them has great individual features regarding analytics, effective local listing opportunities, the ability to automatically update your business information with minimum effort or reviews management. In order to test and choose the best one, you’ll have to know what your needs are and understand how local SEO works. Get to know them before you make a choice.
Local SEO has become more important than ever. It seems that 46% of all searches on Google are seeking for local information. From all of that, 76% of local searches result in a phone call on the same day. Moreover, 28% of people who search on their smartphone for something nearby resulted in a purchase.
1. cognitiveSEO
Let’s start the list with cognitveSEO and then mentioned lots of other solutions, depending on everyone’s needs. cognitiveSEO is a friend from the house so we’ll be more than glad to present it to you.
For tracking and improving your local SEO, cognitiveSEO has 2 neat features: the Rank Tracker and The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant.
The Rank Tracker has advanced options to follow the evolution of your keywords by checking local rank tracking on any device and browser you want.
It is as simple to use as you think: add the keywords you are interested in ranking for (or check the suggested keywords if you’re not sure what keywords to track yet), select the country, the browser and check the Local Rank Tracking box. You can check the rankings as locally as you want. You can also add the same keywords on different locations so you can compare rankings on different location afterwards.
cognitiveSEO’s Local Rank tracking tool has lots of advantages:
- you’ll have an accurate view on your website’s performance in local SEO;
- there is a variety of countries and languages you can select from;
- it has accurate city/area precision;
- integrated mobile tracking;
- get instant alert notification whether you suffer from local changes in rankings;
- manage keywords through filters and tags.
The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant is another tool that gives you the possibility of optimizing for local search. You can create or optimize content directly for local SERP. The tool will let you know the exact keywords your content is missing to rank within the top Google results. It’s easy to use, intuitive, saves you tons of time and what’s even more important it actually works. You can check out the story of an agency who improved their rankings from position #5 to position #2 in 24 hours using the tool.
Did you know?
46% of all Google searches have local geographical parameters. That means almost a half of all searches made on Google.
So keeping track of your local keywords is a must. You can use cognitiveSEO’s Rank Tracking for this.For a better understanding of your business performance, compare your universal rankings with your local ones. The variations can be quite big so it’s important to be aware of your ranking situation. This way you can better adapt your strategies on the way, and focus more on what matter most for your business.
On top of that, the tool allows you to keep an eye on all the important Google algorithm updates to see if they had any impact on your website’s rankings.
2. BrightLocal SEO
Founded by Ed Eliot & Myles Anderson in 2009, BrightLocal has a complex local SEO feature, with which you can monitor, audit and optimize. The tool makes it easy to analyze performance data such as organic, local and mobile search rankings, local business listings, customers reviews, Google My Business (GMB) insights, Google Analytics data, and social media interactions.
BrightLocal knows how important online reviews are. Every year, they do the Local Consumer Review Survey and in 2018, the results showed that 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34) and 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34).
Source: BrightLocal
The tool allows you to perform lots of actions to clean and build a reputation online, plus lots of insights to boost your local SEO, using the following features:
- Monitor Local Citations: Get detailed NAP (name, address, phone) audit and find citations opportunities to boost local rankings by spying on your competitors.
- Grow your online reputation: Manage and generate customer feedback on key review sites.
- Optimize Google My Business listing: analyze your GMB data, follow changes and benchmark performance against your competitors.
- Local SEO audit reports: Get detailed information about local SEO metrics, fix issues and perform better reports.
It is a paid tool, with a free trial of 14 days. And the prices start at $29/mo for single business with up to 3 locations.
3. Yext
Yext is an SEO software that helps you manage and include reviews and local pages. The tool has a variety of products and features that make it easy to integrate with lots of local directories. The way it is structured will make sure your business is up-to-date and all the information is accurate.
The local SEO services provided by Yext allow you to put your business on the sight of the user through the various apps available in the Knowledge network. You can see just a few of them in the print screen below; the list is long.
The most used SEO features of this tool are:
- Yext Listings: it puts you in contact with all the listing and gets your business displayed across 100+ digital services globally. Here you’ll find the Knowledge Network that will help you get to your customers.
- Yext Pages: it manages your landing pages to built AI-ready pages for each of your advisors, events, restaurants, menus, locations, and more to offer accurate information and optimized pages for your user. You can build them for scale and conversions.
- Yext Knowledge Manager: it is a cloud-based platform where you can find lots of insights about your audience, what information they seek, starting from locations, holiday hours and in-store promotions to parking entrances and more.
Customer behavior has changed a lot since the growth of local SEO. Yext performed a major analysis using internal data of more than 300,000 customer business locations active from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2018. The study showed that:
Businesses across industries saw more interactions via AI-enabled services than their own websites. Up to 2.7 times as much traffic on third-party sites.
4. Whitespark
Whitespark started as an agency but now focuses on offering SEO software tools. It was founded by local SEO expert Darren Shaw and it’s designed to finding citation opportunities that you might be missing so you can improve your search rankings. Beside that, you can use it to earn reviews, build high-quality backlinks, manage your local search and win more customers.
| Citations are still valuable and important, you still want to build them out, and they’re table stakes now. The algorithm was simpler five years ago, so citations played a bigger role. I think if you don’t do citations, you’re hurting yourself a little bit. If you’re not accurate and listed on the important sites in your industry, you’re going to have a bad time. | |
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Darren Shaw |
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Founder of Whitespark |
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Whitespark is known for the following tools:
- Local Citation Finder: it gives you lots of opportunities to get new citations by spying on your competitors’ citations and find all the places where your business is listed.
- Local Rank Tracker: it tracks and localizes all your ranking data and displays your organic rankings in Google and Bing.
- Reputation Builder: it manages your negative feedback before turning into bad reviews, creates an easy and automated way to collect reviews.
- Link Prospector: it was designed to find new link opportunities. You can amplify your content to earn more shares and links.
- Review Checker: it will check business reviews, to understand if you’re doing well or you’re receiving negative reviews. Plus you’ll get directions to resolve them.
Reviews can influence the user’s decision quite a lot. The “Local Consumer Review Survey 2018” made by BrightLocal showed that positive reviews encourage users to use a business in a fairly large proportion (68%), compared to other factors, such as price and location.
5. Synup
Synup is an all-in-one local marketing software that manages and optimizes your local business content. The tool scans your business online and gives you information on where it is listed. The management system is easy to use, it is fully automated to evaluate your listings, reputation and analytics data.
Here are the local SEO features available on Synup:
- Local listing management: the platform crawls location data on 200+ local search engines and directories and gathers it in one place where you can easily manage your data.
- Aggregate all your interactions: you get instant notifications whenever a customer leaves reviews or interacts on social media through comments, shares. You can respond directly to reviews within the platform.
- Monitor your analytics: automatically track analytics on your business locations’ performance.
- Easy to use reporting: Export all the information you need in any format you want (pdf, excel, CSV).
6. Local SEO Checklist
Local SEO Checklist is a tool developed by Synup that offers something any other tool is lacking: it can fix technical local SEO issues. You can analyze on-page elements, everything related to Google, top business directories, citations, customers reviews and testimonials, website content and backlinking.
Based on the elements you select, you can create checklists, as the name points out, and use the platform as a guide to know exactly what parts of your site need improvements and optimization for local searches. It offers 40 different tasks that detail a specific local SEO action.
Besides all the features available on the platform, you have lots of other options to optimize your website:
- Google Checker: it checks if your Googe My Business has accurate and correct information;
- Schema Scanner: it checks if your website uses correct schema and fixes the issues;
- Audit Business Listing: it checks how your business listing data appears across 48 important directories including Google, Facebook, Yelp and more.
7. Reputation.com
Reputation.com is created for large multi-location businesses to monitor and improve their reputation, and optimize customer experience. It uses AI and natural processing languages to analyze all the data and measure and quantify your brand’s performance to give you the most accurate insights.
The tool has one of the best features for multi-location management, in case you’re having lots of properties to take care of. You can keep your properties in order and managed. The dashboard is user-friendly and you have all the features on sight to audit business listing, publish on social media, including customer sentiment and industry benchmarking to gain ranking advantage in front of your competitors.
Here are the key features available to help you improve your local search rankings:
- Directory Management: the tool keeps all your location data accurate and helps you manage them in order to lead the customer to your online and offline store.
- Business Listing: easily claim all your listings and fix any mistakes or missing data, then submit the correct information to all the third party websites to get to your audience.
- Online Reviews: keep your reputation clean by using the tool to find out what customers are saying about you, lead them to send reviews and monitor all of them through the centralized dashboard.
- Reputation score: Based on the information it founds online, the tool will calculate a reputation score letting you know what you’ll have to improve.
Reputation.com’s goal is to help businesses have all the information in one place to improve website visibility and increase rankings.
8. Moz Local
Moz Local is one of the most known local SEO tools. It can be used for both small businesses and big enterprises, especially for increasing visibility and checking listing issues. On top all of that, Moz assures business listing on all major online directories and aggregators and gets rid of all the duplicates and wrong information about your business.
It makes sure all the listings are correct and consistent. Plus it secures your relationship with your audience by having the option to get instant notifications for new reviews to offer real-time feedback.
Here are the local SEO solutions that the software offers to make your business ready, set and distributed over the web:
- Social media verification account: make sure it has Facebook and Twitter verified account;
- Directory and aggregator submission: Moz locally shares your listing across the search distribution; plus you’ll get a distribution report to analyze the effectiveness of your published listing over time.
- Local listing distribution dashboard: setup your business listing;
- Google My Business sync: claim your business and sync the data to share accurate NAP information and more;
- Review monitoring: monitor your reviews and ratings to have an accurate view of your business.
9. Tribe Local
Tribe Local is a local SEO tool for managing listings and online reputation. Beside the other SEO softwares, Tribe Local makes it very easy to create white-label reports to your business or for local clients, export bulk data and add unlimited users and freelancers. Plus, it has even over 200 local listing sites, including premium citations.
Based on your results, you can get a score to see exactly what your business is lacking in local optimization: Citations score, Reviews score, Rakings score, Analytics score, GMB score. Here’s the main features of Tribe Local you can use to amplify the online presence and performance of your client’s business:
- Business Directory Citations: Use it to check your existing local SEO citations, add it to 200+ local business directories and fix any listing you have.
- Reviews Management: Scan to check your existing online business reviews, analyze your ratings, analyze the feedback and perform multiple analysis for your business on a certain period of time.
- Local SEO Ranking: The local tracker allows you to keep track of all business metrics, have a clear picture of your present status and track local rankings to be ahead of your competitors. Plus you can generate local performance analytics and see your evolution.
- Reputation Management: Analyze sentiment of reviews posted online, create testimonial widgets to convert happy customers, send customized email campaigns to your customers, receive alerts and track all your reviews.
- Google My Business: Add your businesses in GMB and other 200+ business directory sites. Edit and fix all of your business citations.
Besides all of these, the tool has lots of advantages for agencies, as they promote it as a good fit for those working with multiples accounts and users.
10. Advice Local
Advice Local is the last SEO tool from our list, but not the least important. It creates competition to Yext, and it has a great advantage over Yext due to the fact you can manually build out local citations while Yext uses an API. Compared to the other tools, it has a voice search algorithm that gives you directions on how well your location is featured on voice assistants. Plus, Advice Local is a complete all-in-one local SEO solution for local optimization. They brag about the power to ensure the accuracy and visibility of your business’ location information on search engines.
The Data Amplifier network publishes data about your listing on strong sites like Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and Facebook to enhance your local presence online. It includes a big database of data aggregators, data accelerators, data enhancers, additional GPS accelerators, vertical directories, and other directories for legal, home services, finance, and restaurants.
Here are the local solutions proposed by Advice Local:
- Listing Management: It uses a combination of APIs and manual submissions to claim, create and optimize listings. It has integrated GMB, Bing and Yelp local pages
- Store Locator: The dashboard allows you to manage multi-location businesses, create SEO optimized landing pages and add store locator to your client’s websites to keep them connected with their audience.
- Voice Search Readiness Test: It uses an algorithm to provide a score for you local businesses based on how easy they are found on all voice assistants (Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant).
The bottom line is that you need to perform local optimization for your business, if it’s the case of course. There are many myths around local SEO so make sure you get your strategies right. In the local SEO area there are always new things to discover that can help your business get new customers, improve your visibility and get more local searches.
There is no one size fits all tool. Yet, the above tools are a great starting point and a big help for you to keep your local business going. Check them out and feel free to make additions to the list in the comment section below.
The post The Best Local SEO Tools & Software to Improve your Google Rankings appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
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