With local businesses, little things matter. Every small detail is important to get right – name, address, phone number, not because you don’t know them, but somewhere along the line, you might have changed your phone number, or moved your address, and forgot to update it somewhere.
A Citation Audit can help identify those inconsistencies, especially the information that’s important to search engines, and if there are specific issues that are preventing your website from appearing on searches.
Incorrect citations or even simple inconsistencies like an old address or phone number can stop you from getting the best results on your local rankings. Each time there’s an inconsistency of information, or an inaccurate citation, it adds up, and you might end up not even showing on the search results, even if someone searches for you by name.
Citation Audits include business name, address, phone number, hours of operations, and other relevant information that show up on the first and second lines of search results. Citations show up in local directories, listings, social platforms, and all of those citations impact your search engine rankings. So it matters what’s out there!
Places Scout caters to local SEO businesses and consultants as an automated all-in-one solution for SEO research, campaigns, and data intelligence. It’s a complete service with a strong set of analytic capabilities.
However, one of the stronger applications of Places Scout is their reporting on your citations and your competitor citations, as well as verifying your NAP for accuracy and consistency. Their audit algorithm performs well in locating and aggregating all of your potential citations sources and reports inaccuracies on your business info.
Request a demo, or use their contact form to get a callback consultation.
BrightLocal is another one-stop-shop SEO platform that caters to local SEO applications. Their customized Location Dashboard is easy to use, tracks organic, local and mobile rankings, and monitors online reviews. BrightLocal’s dashboard also presents reporting on SEO audits, Google MyBusiness audits, and Google Analytics.
One of the key features of BrightLocal is their citation tracker that audits your listings and produces a report on any incorrect or duplicate citations. They also offer a citation building service to claim and correct the inaccuracies, so you don’t have to. Their competitor audits are also helpful in assessing where you stand in the local rankings.
We recommend their 14 day free trial with limited features and if you stay with them, they charge only $2 per site.
Whitespark has a rating of 4.9/5 stars and that’s reason enough to consider it. Other reasons include focus on local SEO, reputation building and local citation services. Their citation audit and cleanup tools analyze and fix your incorrect citations, and claim your missing citations. In addition, they have services for building up your citations, that they perform manually for a very reasonable price.
Yes, the best part about Whitespark is their pricing – while companies like Yext might charge you $500/year for less than 50 listings, you can pay a one-time fee of $5 per profile for your local/niche citations.
Moz Pro lends its authority to creating targeted content by optimizing your website for high impact. Its Site-Crawl solution addresses minor site issues like missing tags and broken links that can have a major impact on your local SEO. Better yet, you can set it up to run automatically so you don’t have to worry about it.
You can optimize your local citations and your local SEO, starting with your Google My Business account. Their automatic interface will give you a score on your online presence across a slew of platforms in which Moz is syndicated. A useful feature is that they can switch you from a different platform automatically including importing your settings and content.
Everything until the diagnosis is free. Then you can subscribe to one of their plans starting from $129 for the basic features.
If you’re using a bunch of different tools to piecemeal your SEO strategy, then consider a comprehensive solution like SEOprofiler. It includes a lot of features like automated audits, daily ranking checks, backlinking, and on-page and off-page optimization, but the one we’re interested in here is their local SEO and analytics.
SEOprofiler can analyze and categorize warnings and critical notices on your website. Their abilities even include correct spelling errors and duplicate content. Their tools can analyze your citations and remove anything on your page that has a negative influence on your ranking profiles, thereby improving the indexability of your page.
Their plans start from $69 and you get everything but with limited use of pages, profiles, and projects. The premium plan has no limits. SEOprofiler is a good service for a reasonable price.
There’s nothing draconic about the Dragon Metrics dashboard – it’s as pretty as you can get. But that’s not the only reason to get it – their platform offers several powerful tools and tracking solutions like keyword ranking, on-site and off-page optimization, and in-depth reporting.
For local SEO, we’re interested in their competitive analysis and tracking mobile performance, but more importantly, finding and fixing site issues and citations. Their on-site optimization reviews 50 of the most common issues that could be impacting your page’s indexability, which can come in handy for a quick check.
Their plans starting from $99 will get you 5 campaigns (pages with everything on it), 30 competitors, and 1000 keywords. That should be a good start for a local SEO audit.
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Do you run a local business? How do you know what people are searching on Google when they look for a local business? And how can you ensure that you show up at the top of your customer’s search results when they look for a business near them? The answer is Local SEO.
Think about this: according toMoz, 90% of purchases take place in physical stores, and 80% of US disposable income is spent within 20 miles of home. Gas, groceries, coffee shops, barber shops and restaurants are all necessarily local searches. With stats like that, you can’t afford to rely on global search engine rankings for your local customers to find you.
But how (and more importantly, why) do you need to focus on Local SEO? It includes optimizing your website in a way that increases traffic by finding and using local keywords, optimizing your business profile and building NAP (Name Address Phone) citations. That means, you need to know what people are searching for, and create your content, answers, and products around what they’re looking for. And how do you know what people are searching for? There are a few things you want to take into consideration.
One is to make sure that your information on the internet is correct and consistent across all search engines. Two, ensure important info like your business name, address, phone, locations and ratings show up on the first or second line of search results. (Don’t forget Google Maps). Three, how your business appears in SERP (search engine results pages) pages, directories and other sites that provide listings of local services. And finally, to ensure that all of your information (SEO content) remains relevant through time, and updated periodically as necessary.
If that feels like a lot to look at, we’ve done the work of putting together a list of tools and solutions that will make it easier for you to use an all-in-one service that can do several things. We share our best local SEO tools and solutions below.
Synup tools pretty much cover everything that you might need from a local SEO solution. Their service includes 4 aspects: “Presence, Content, Reputation, and Insights”. They have the capability to manage digital profiles for all your business locations and make real-time updates to information about those profiles in the top media channels. This can help you with two important functionalities: one, monitor your performance and two, improve the discoverability of your website. Other features include an automated tool that searches for relevant keywords near all your business profiles so you can update your content. And another significant feature is their reputation management software that can monitor and respond to customer reviews to ensure brand safety and reputation.
You can request a free demo, but their price is not available on their website – contact directly.
Local SEO Checklist, as the name might suggest, covers a lot of aspects in terms of local SEO tools. They divide their focus into 30 “simple steps”, like their on-page elements to help with tags, images, navigation menu, and NAP (name, address, phone number). Then they have what they call “All Things Google” service that creates/claims your Google My Business listing and tracks your website search performance. Local SEO Checklist also works with other directories like Bing or Yelp and manages your listings on other niche-specific sites and social media platforms. And if you think this is not enough, Local SEO Checklist also helps with reviews, citations and building and tracking backlinks.
Their checklist downloadable is super handy to get a gist of what they offer. For pricing questions, they provide a contact form.
The primary goal of 51 Blocks is visibility and marketing. They claim to have a “tried and tested method of running an online marketing and SEO campaign,” using their tools that optimize your website for keywords results, monitor your local search rank, and search trends that can help boost your local visibility. In addition, their marketing services include managing your paid ads on search engines (PPC – pay per clicks) and social media platforms.
You’ll need to reach out to them if you want more information about pricing.
For local businesses, customer reviews are a key factor in Google’s search engine algorithms. GatherUp calls itself a review engine – it does this one thing, and does it well. They focus on local SEO to improve your website’s visibility through improving your ratings. GatherUp’s specialized tools and automated process allows you to easily add customers, manage your communication, brand your messages, market your reviews, and get insights through data and reporting.
Their pricing plans are simple, starting at $75 per month/location. We recommend that you request a demo.
Advanced Web Ranking is a full-featured SEO ranking and tracking software that offers solid local SEO capabilities. They provide rank tracking on any search engine, and in any location in the world. You can even get down to the GPS coordinates of the location you want to track. Plus, they offer extensive customizable reports, and tailored rankings for your niche or segment data. An added bonus – intuitive user interface.
Their plans are simple, starting at $49 per month for 2000 keywords and all the ranking features and reports.
There are several appealing reasons to consider Rankwatch – one reason is that they make even complex tracking look simple by providing a single dashboard to monitor analytics, provide SEO data and rank tracking. Although they have over 100 parameters to check on your website, they offer ‘set and forget’ alerts that are easy to use. And for local businesses, Rankwatch has some advanced features like city based rank checking, micro analysis of your local keywords, and complete citation analysis.
And the most appealing reason to consider Rankwatch is that their pricing plans are so reasonable, starting at $29 per month, for 250 keywords and a monitor of 145.000 backlinks.
The best argument for choosing Microsite Masters is for their accuracy in analytics and reporting. Their customers love their near-zero error rate. Their features aren’t too shabby either. Microsite Masters provides advanced management tools, like an SEO scoreboard in a single screen. They offer location sensitive reports that can be tailored to a specific location, city, or zip code. This is what makes MMR an attractive choice for local SEO.
Their plans start at $49 per month, for 1500 keywords, unlimited URL, and all the
The Search Monitor is a powerful tool to gather and analyze competitive information, and also to protect your local brand in your location. They do this by performing affiliate threat analysis, affiliate compliance, and high-frequency, low-impact crawling. An added feature is that they automatically submit violations to ensure a better response rate from search engines.
They don’t post their prices on their website, but they do offer a free demo.
SEO profiler is a heavy-duty rank tracking service and a marketing solution that offers automatic audits, website optimization, and backlink builders. It also has additional features like their social media monitor and powerful analytics and reporting to monitor your site statistics. Their Deep Search and City Ranking Check across 92,000 cities makes it ultimately useful for local SEO needs like local organic searches and local rank tracking. But let’s be honest – it’s the competitor keyword reports that come in handy to get a leg up on the interwebs.
Their plans start from $69 and you get everything but with limited use of pages, profiles, and projects (A page with all the files in it). The premium plan has no limits.
In the end, Seo Profiler can give local rank tracking, with the most important search engines and also have the organic rankings feature, so it’s a pretty complete service.
AuthorityLabs is a specialized solution that focuses entirely on tracking keywords and their positions on search engines. It doesn’t include other SEO features available in one-stop-shop services. But what it does, it does well. It provides advanced rank tracking tools, a user friendly interface, and tracks a wide range of search engine data. They also provide a cool feature of recovering search “organic keywords” not provided by you but related to your business. A feature their local SEO customers love is that they show you what’s working in your local SEO strategy by targeting specific opportunities.
Their plans start from $49, and they have a free trial.
AuthorityLabs works with local and global ranks, but the feature of getting information from multiple sources makes them a highly effective tracking service.
Moz Pro offers a single suite of SEO solutions that include everything from website optimization, to sitewide crawling, to link tracking, and ad hoc keyword research. Moz has proven itself to be the beginning, middle and the end among SEO marketing tools. For local businesses, Moz Pro’s ad hoc keyword research provides useful insights into local keywords, their organic click-through rate, and priority on any search engine. Everything until the diagnosis is free. Subscribing to their basic plan starting from $129 offers limited reporting, and ad hoc keyword research.
By focusing on keywords with local rankings, Moz Pro can be appealing for local SEO needs, considering they offer a decent amount of keywords (300) for their cheapest membership.
Ahrefs is another pro SEO tool that offers an all-in-one solution that includes keyword management to competitive analysis. Ahrefs manages the largest index of backlinks on the internet, and has other powerful features like ad hoc keyword research, competitive domain comparison. Their vast database of over 7 billion keywords in 171 countries is updated every month. They focus, not just on Google, but other places like YouTube, Amazon, Bing, and Baidu.
However Ahrefs is not beginner friendly. Its user interface doesn’t deign to look pretty or appealing. It’s a loaded tool aimed at SEO pros who know what they’re doing. And it ain’t cheap either. You can subscribe to one of their plans starting from $99 for the basic features that include one user and five projects.
Another power player is the Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker, called the SEO Power Suite. Features include keyword research, rank checking, and user friendly tools. They also offer competitor comparison and analysis. One of their most interesting features is their historical comparisons, showing how your site has moved in rankings for a period of time.
Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker comes in two tiers: Professional and Enterprise. The enterprise tier is aimed toward mega-corporations with a substantial presence. But they do offer great discounts if you buy a bundle of their tools. Their plans start at $129 for the Professional and $299 for the Enterprise version, billed annually.
Web CEO provides a whole suite of SEO tools that include rank checking, keywords, site optimization, audits, backlink analysis, and several other incidental features. The page auditor feature is useful for showing dead or broken links, and SEO errors. Their Buzz Tracker is a unique feature that tracks across blogs and social media channels for a user’s brand. This is where it’s very effective for local SEO.
At its core, Web CEO is a simple rank tracking service, but for local searches, organic rankings and metrics, it’s a useful tool to consider. Their plans start at $39.
WooRank is an easy to use digital SEO solution that focuses on automatic website reviews. WooRank provides in-depth analysis to help online marketers convert your visitors into loyal customers, monitor your competitors, and track your company’s progress in real time. An added advantage with WooRank is their easy to absorb presentation formats where you can get your customers’ positive and negative reviews at a glance.
Their plans start at $59.99 monthly, but they offer a 30% discount if you pay annually.
Dyno Mapper is a sitemap generator that you can use to perform content audits, and content inventories. It’s easy to use and navigate. Their visual presentations are appealing, and their website accessibility testing is what their customers rave about. It’s especially useful in the local SEO arena, as it provides insights into how your content is performing in local SERP. Dyno Mapper will import and create your website’s metadata, providing you with the option to track each keyword or keyword phrase. You have the option to look for specific locations or types of devices (mobile or desktop, local or global).
DM is a splendid way to start optimize the use of your SEO tools because it will give you a global understanding of how your website is performing in local search, local rankings, and overall on Google and Bing. Their plans start at $59.99 monthly, but they offer a 30% discount if you pay annually.
Places Scout caters to local SEO businesses and consultants as an automated all-in-one solution for SEO research, campaigns, and data intelligence. It’s a complete service with a strong set of analytic capabilities.
However, one of the stronger applications of Places Scout is their reporting on your citations and your competitor citations, as well as verifying your NAP for accuracy and consistency. Their audit algorithm performs well in locating and aggregating all of your potential citations sources and reports inaccuracies on your business info.
Request a demo, or use their contact form to get a callback consultation.
BrightLocal is another one-stop-shop SEO platform that caters to local SEO applications. Their customized Location Dashboard is easy to use, tracks organic, local and mobile rankings, and monitors online reviews. BrightLocal’s dashboard also presents reporting on SEO audits, Google MyBusiness audits, and Google Analytics.
One of the key features of BrightLocal is their citation tracker that audits your listings and produces a report on any incorrect or duplicate citations. They also offer a citation building service to claim and correct the inaccuracies, so you don’t have to. Their competitor audits are also helpful in assessing where you stand in the local rankings.
We recommend their 14 day free trial with limited features and if you stay with them, they charge only $2 per site.
Whitespark has a rating of 4.9/5 stars and that’s reason enough to consider it. Other reasons include focus on local SEO, reputation building and local citation services. Their citation audit and cleanup tools analyze and fix your incorrect citations, and claim your missing citations. In addition, they have services for building up your citations, that they perform manually for a very reasonable price.
Yes, the best part about Whitespark is their pricing – while companies like Yext might charge you $500/year for less than 50 listings, you can pay a one-time fee of $5 per profile for your local/niche citations.
Moz Pro lends its authority to creating targeted content by optimizing your website for high impact. Its Site-Crawl solution addresses minor site issues like missing tags and broken links that can have a major impact on your local SEO. Better yet, you can set it up to run automatically so you don’t have to worry about it.
You can optimize your local citations and your local SEO, starting with your Google My Business account. Their automatic interface will give you a score on your online presence across a slew of platforms in which Moz is syndicated. A useful feature is that they can switch you from a different platform automatically including importing your settings and content.
Everything until the diagnosis is free. Then you can subscribe to one of their plans starting from $129 for the basic features.
If you’re using a bunch of different tools to piecemeal your SEO strategy, then consider a comprehensive solution like SEOprofiler. It includes a lot of features like automated audits, daily ranking checks, backlinking, and on-page and off-page optimization, but the one we’re interested in here is their local SEO and analytics.
SEOprofiler can analyze and categorize warnings and critical notices on your website. Their abilities even include correct spelling errors and duplicate content. Their tools can analyze your citations and remove anything on your page that has a negative influence on your ranking profiles, thereby improving the indexability of your page.
Their plans start from $69 and you get everything but with limited use of pages, profiles, and projects. The premium plan has no limits. SEOprofiler is a good service for a reasonable price.
There’s nothing draconic about the Dragon Metrics dashboard – it’s as pretty as you can get. But that’s not the only reason to get it – their platform offers several powerful tools and tracking solutions like keyword ranking, on-site and off-page optimization, and in-depth reporting.
For local SEO, we’re interested in their competitive analysis and tracking mobile performance, but more importantly, finding and fixing site issues and citations. Their on-site optimization reviews 50 of the most common issues that could be impacting your page’s indexability, which can come in handy for a quick check.
Their plans starting from $99 will get you 5 campaigns (pages with everything on it), 30 competitors, and 1000 keywords. That should be a good start for a local SEO audit.
Let’s face it – Moz Pro is expensive, and do you really need all that it offers for a local SEO audit? It offers a smorgasbord of features, but here we’ll talk about two of its features that we’re interested in: Site Crawl and Moz Local.
A slow site is sure to send your users away if it takes more than a few seconds to load. And worse if it’s a broken site, with broken links or error pages. Moz Pro’s Site Crawl will analyze and identify those problems, and allow you to fix them before your users get to them.
And with Moz Local, it’s a separate subscription focused on local SEO, to clean and update your location data, delete duplicates and add a store locator.
Everything until the diagnosis is free. After that you can subscribe to one of their plans starting from $129 for the basic features.
If you’re a small business, we know you’re trying to do most things yourself, including your SEO audits. It’s a slow, painful process, and not always accurate. BrightLocal offers a way out of your manual misery. It caters specifically to local businesses with their Local Search Audit.
BrightLocal’s audit includes search rankings and reviews, local listings and links, Google My Business and other social media channels. They analyze more than 300 data points and present a color-coded report that’s customizable.
And it’s not pricey. Their plans starting from $29 get you access to audit one business and three locations. With the premium plan, you get up to 100 locations.
It’s a given that if you want people to find your business, you need to be listed accurately. Not just on your website, but on all major listing sites, and not just for SEO purposes, but so people can find you from any platform. PlacesScout audits and verifies your NAP information (name, address and phone) and shows you how your business info appears on the major listing and directory sites. Errors are bolded and highlighted in red. You’ll also receive an average listing rating of your site.
You can manually fix the errors yourself, or decide to invest in a service like Yext or Whitespark. This can be especially useful if you have a business with multiple locations – PlacesScout provides a multi-location listing summary view to filter large amounts of data.
Everything is linked with google my business, which makes everything great for local search. Prices are not available online. Please contact them directly, or request a demo.
Dragon Metrics is a global SEO platform, however it offers features (and a price point) that are helpful for local SEO and audits. To rank better on search engines and Google maps, you need to fix your critical issues and their on-site optimization tool helps review the 50 most common issues affecting your page indexability.
What we’ve found helpful is their step-by-step guide, especially geared towards SEO newbies, so you can fix the issues yourself, and they even prioritize the important issues so you’ll know what to attack first. And of course, their competitor analysis tools come in handy too.
Their plans starting from $99 get you 5 campaigns (pages with everything on it), 30 competitors, and 1000 keywords. That’s a great start for a local SEO audit.
How do you signal to your local customers that you want their business? By showing a web presence that’s engaged and responsive. Linkdex collects your business data from your website and benchmark your website’s overall performance. They can help with building your website as a strong foundation for your business, but also in local listings, directories and search engines.
Linkdex’s deep market research data and competitor analysis can be particularly useful for local businesses. We especially like their content performance tracking, that shows you how you perform by domain and by location.
Their basic plan, starting from $600 billed annually, is a little pricey, but contains every feature and ranking intelligence for 10 pages.
Local focused content is the cornerstone for doing local SEO successfully. Because you want to target your specific region interested in your specific market. So getting your information right is crucial to having your customers to come back for repeat business.
BridgeEdge guides content creation and optimization by some of their features like showing the intent behind search queries, and exposing competitors’ content for each topic. This is valuable data for local markets. It offers other features like monitoring how your content performs in your local market, and tracks your performance on mobile devices.
Pricing is not shown online, but you can receive a custom proposal for your business when you sign up for a demo.
How to stand out in your local market when everyone else is online as well? SeoClarity offers a powerful platform to obtain local search intelligence, including your local visibility, local ranking, local performance, and provides detailed analytics and data that can help you map out an effective strategy to stand out in your market.
We appreciate SeoClarity’s mobile ranking data which they claim is 10x more than other platforms. If you have a local business with multiple locations, their platform offers strategies to perform better by location.
Pricing starts at $0.15 per keyword, $750/month, making it one of the more expensive products on this list.
SE Ranking offers many features, but what makes it a great platform to include on this list is their pricing strategy – you can pay for the services you need and use. For an all-in-one solution, SE Ranking is low cost, flexible to use, and user-friendly.
For local SEO, SE Ranking offers real-time ranking positions of your website’s keywords, their audits are accurate (so they claim) and can find critical issues and solutions to fix them. It’s friendly to business owners, but provides powerful functionalities for SEO pros and digital agencies.
Their flexible plans start at $39, and you can set the number of pages, keywords, and backlinks that you want to control and monitor for your business.
Yoast has a Local SEO plugin that makes it simple to put yourself on Google’s radar, by taking care of the technical details of updating your NAP information and Google Maps. It helps local businesses show real-time open hours, ratings and reviews and contact info. It also allows you to add a store finder if you have multiple locations, and makes everything responsive so you look good on your website as well as mobile.
Yoast is popular (just look at their millions of downloads), and some of its features are free. With the free version, you get templates for better branding and improving your search rankings. It also includes Schema maps which help engines like google search make sense of your website and get more visitors. Their “readability analysis” allows you to write SEO-friendly texts that are engaging and easy to read.
Paid versions start at $69 but they sometimes run discounts.
Google Places Reviews is a widget that you can embed on your WordPress website that displays your business information, and showcase your reviews. While it’s not exactly an SEO tool, highlighting your positive reviews is a great way to gain traffic and online credibility.
It’s a little widget that goes far – includes versatile widget themes, and an autocomplete feature to look up businesses in your area.
Structured data is standardized search engine vocabulary, and because it’s a technical language, it’s difficult to get it right manually without help. But search engines like Google use this data to show information about your content, like star ratings, events, embedded search box, videos, etc.
WP SEO Structured Data Schema does the work for you. With the free version of the plugin, you can add schema for local businesses, restaurants, events and services, and include data for reviews, news items, ratings, and products.
The pro version includes auto-fill feature, custom post types, other schema types like courses, job postings, movies, music, etc.
Similar to WP SEO, Five Star is a WordPress plugin that offers a way to add schema structured data to your page quickly and easily. Adding a business contact card is a useful feature, and so is adding a Google map, opening hours and multiple location addresses.
The Five Star plugin allows you to choose from several microdata types like local business schema, restaurant schema, organization schema, and several others, that can help your business information be customized to look pretty on the website.
The premium version comes with additional features like a default helper functionality for your specific schema, integrations like WooCommerce to enhance your products, and post rich snippets to add markup to your posts.
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