Local SEO is now more crucial than before. Dominating local search results is becoming more important than any other marketing strategy for small businesses as the competition grows closer to home.
If your small business isn’t focusing too much on local SEO yet, these statistics should persuade you to change your mind:
- 46% of customers are more likely to trust online reviews than personal recommendations.
- Within a day, 18% of local mobile searches result in a sale.
- 50% of local mobile searchers are seeking business details, such as a local address.
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Still not convinced? See this post for a comprehensive list of local SEO trends and statistics.
Understanding Local SEO
Businesses can use local SEO as a digital marketing strategy to increase their online visibility and target customers based on their location. Research indicates that 78% of consumers look up local businesses online more than once a week.
Additionally, statistics reveal that 97% of people find out about local businesses online before anywhere else. Because of this, local SEO is an essential part of your company’s marketing plan.
People who search are also usually ready to buy because they want to find the best products and services in their area. Customers want quick answers in their area, and most sales go to brands that do well on local search engine results pages (SERPs).
Because of this, you should make sure that your website and material show up high in geo-specific searches for the areas that your business serves. When you do local SEO right, it’s easy for people to find information about your business. That makes them more likely to buy something from you.
Key Features of Local SEO Tools
Numerous features will be available to you with a local SEO product. You need to decide which of these features will be best for your business before you purchase any of them:
1. Listings Management
The search engine can tell a customer about a business in their area when they are looking for a good or service. These citations, or listings, have the name, phone number, and location of your business. Even if your company doesn’t claim the listing, the search engine will fill in the details by scraping the web. In some cases, this could lead to wrong information.
For listing control, there is a citation finder that lets you see all of your listings on search engines, local directories, review sites, and social media sites. Most of the time, the seller and the reference finder work together to get this information. Without a local SEO tool, it will be hard to keep track of, change, and add new citations.
2. Rank tracking
This is a very important part that tells you how search engines see your place. You can keep an eye on your website’s score for certain local keywords by using rank trackers. With this information, you can come up with ways to improve the local search rankings of any place that isn’t doing well. You can also look at how your ranks have changed over time with historical reports.
3. Reputation management
One benefit of having a good online image is that it can help your search ranking. Even though a good local SEO tool can’t promise you hundreds of five-star reviews, it can help you build your image by responding honestly to reviews from past customers and even asking them to leave reviews. Review sites, search engines, social media, and other sites and outlets can all use its help with managing reviews.
4. Optimizing Google My Business
By making changes to your GMB page, you can move up in local search results. With the GMB platform, you can change how your business appears online on all Google products, like Google Maps and Google Search. With a local SEO tool that has the GMB optimization feature, you can plan Google posts, keep up with your social media accounts, and take care of your business listings.
5. Dashboard and reporting
With these products, you can track the effectiveness of your local SEO strategy with reports that include a variety of metrics and data visualization. Online reputation, local citation score, ranking history, and social activity are a few examples of these insights.
6. Social media
Don’t forget about social media as an important way to connect with customers. Search engines look at your social media accounts when they decide what to show in the search results. Some SEO tools let you schedule material, manage your accounts, and talk to customers directly on social media sites that are integrated with the software.
SEO Expert Picks: Top Local SEO Tools
Let’s return to the main subject at hand: using trustworthy local SEO tools to boost your local SEO. The tools on this list allow you to enhance, track, and monitor your local SEO efforts.
The seven powerful local SEO tools listed below will help you increase your local visibility and appear on local search results pages. They will showcase your offerings, make it simple for customers to contact you, and assist you in making your company stand out to those looking for companies just like yours. Select the right tools that best fit your needs, your visibility level, and the assistance you require.
1. SEMrush Local
SEMrush Local is a set of local SEO tools designed to help companies manage and enhance their online presence in local searches. It consolidates multiple aspects of local SEO, from managing business listings to tracking local rankings and monitoring customer reviews, into a single platform.
Here are some of SEMrush Local’s common features:
- Review Management: Monitor the reviews and ratings for your Google Business Profile (GBP) through the process of reading, evaluating, and responding to user comments. Additionally, using this tool, you can automate response suggestions and set up auto-replies to improve the efficiency of your review management procedure.
- Listing Management: With SEMrush’s global support for more than 150 directories, managing and distributing consistent business information (NAP) among various local directories is a breeze.
- Local Rank Checker: “Position Tracking” provides information about how well your company is performing in local search results.
- Map Rank Tracker: View your positions in detail on Google Maps, along with a comparison of your performance against that of your rivals. Observe how your rankings fluctuate based on your potential clients’ search locations.
- On-Page SEO Checker: This feature helps you optimize your local SEO content. It offers suggestions for enhancing the visibility of local search results by optimizing meta titles, descriptions, and other on-page components.
Price details:
2. Local SEO Checklist
The Local SEO Checklist is an excellent resource for those new to SEO. Think of it as a comprehensive local SEO strategy checklist that includes all the SEO techniques you need to use to make sure customers can find your company when they’re looking for businesses in your area.
There are many reasons to use this important local SEO tool.
- Simple to use: The website makes the SEO process simple to follow by breaking down each step. You can proceed to the next aspect after finishing the previous one.
- Citation submission services: Obtaining local citations, or business listings, takes time, even though they are crucial for raising local search performance. To guarantee that your company appears in a variety of online directories, Local SEO Checklist provides a paid citation service.
- Downloadable: The checklist is available for free download.
Price details: Free
3. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best WordPress Google Analytics (GA) plugin available. The user interface is so intuitive and simple that over 3 million people adore it. It enables users to access and analyze GA data on their own websites. For instance, the plugin makes it simple to monitor website traffic, referral traffic, the most popular pages and keywords on your site, and more.
This local SEO tool offers a plethora of business data to help you improve your local SEO. For example, you can use it to create reports that display your visitors’ demographics and interests. This useful information allows you to tailor content specifically to each of your locations. Personalized content generates more clicks and higher engagement rates. These tell search engines that your content is worthwhile, which improves your rankings.
Additional features in MonsterInsights allow you to assess how well your local SEO strategy is working and make necessary adjustments for maximum effect.
Price details:
4. Moz Local
Many companies and expert marketing agencies use Moz Local, one of the popular local SEO tools. You can use it to ensure that your business listings are accurate and to enhance your online presence. Real-time updates to your business profile and location data are simple to implement with this local SEO software.
It also provides additional benefits:
- Analytics: You can also get important KPIs from this software, such as a Visibility index, an online presence score, and a complete profile.
- Automated listing management: Moz will submit data to the search engines and directories most frequently used by your target audience.
- Review management: Moz Local simplifies the process of monitoring, reading, and responding to reviews from both websites and search engines, all from a single dashboard.
Price details:
5. SEO Scout
SEO Scout facilitates structured data management. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use Microdata, HTML, or JSON-LD (coding). SEO Scout will handle it on your behalf, ensuring that your website complies with Google’s guidelines and is accurate and functional.
With its potent local SEO capabilities, SEO Scout provides the following advantages:
- SEO analysis: You can test and evaluate prospective website modifications, such as new titles, meta descriptions, and long-tail keywords, with SEO Scout’s testing system.
- Local rank tracker: Keep tabs on each local keyword’s performance to identify any new ranking opportunities.
- Know technical SEO issues: SEO Scout will assist you in identifying and resolving issues, such as inadequate internal link structure and thin content, to help you improve your local search engine ranking.
Price details:
6. Google Business Profile
Another local SEO tool that every business needs is Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly known as Google My Business (GMB). Creating an optimized profile can help you improve your search engine visibility on the platform.
When you have a Google Business Profile, your customers can easily obtain crucial information about your company. Your name, address, and phone number are a few examples. These are the fundamental components of NAP SEO.
Using GBP, you can compare companies to find out who your local competitors are. In addition to incorporating a “book an appointment” button to facilitate direct communication from your GBP listing on SERPs, you can also monitor reviews and respond to them.
For increased interaction, you can also add posts, graphics, videos, and photos.
Price details: Free
7. Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is another free tool that can help you improve your local SEO. It assists you in monitoring your search engine ranking and resolving technical SEO problems that are adversely affecting it.
You can also use GSC to track your SERP rankings. This is critical because it helps to optimize your pages that are dropping in search results.
One of GSC’s main drawbacks is the fact that you must alternate between GSC and your site is one of the main drawbacks of GSC. We strongly advise you to use Search Statistics, our Google Search Console integration, because it provides you with all of your GSC data directly in your WordPress dashboard.
GSC is a useful local SEO tool, though, if you’re willing to sift through and understand all the data.
Price details: Free
Closing Words
We hope you now understand the significance of local SEO, as well as the various tools available for its implementation. With these handy local SEO tools, you can easily maintain your local SEO strategy and save a ton of time by fine-tuning your online listings with the help of these handy local SEO tools.
You can use these tools to track metrics, increase leads and conversions, and improve the visibility of your business, whether you have an online or physical store.
Supriti is a seasoned Content Writer at SwiftPropel, boasting over 8 years of experience in SEO content writing. Her expertise lies in crafting compelling, search-engine-optimized content that not only engages readers but also ranks highly in search results. At SwiftPropel, Supriti combines her passion for storytelling with a deep understanding of SEO strategies to deliver content that drives traffic and converts leads.