Did you know that 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information? What is even more mind-blowing is the fact that 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours.
These stats, and many more, prove how important local SEO is. Having the right tools for any given task is critical to the success of a local business.
This blog post summarizes the best local SEO tools for your different business needs in 2021.
By using these tools, you can easily track your rankings, spy on competitors, develop SEO-optimized keywords, monitor your performance, encourage customer engagement and much more.
Let’s step up your online presence right now!
Local SEO Tools for Different Use Cases
#1. MOZ Local
Moz Local is undoubtedly one of the most popular local SEO tools out there. It is an all-in-one SEO solution that helps you improve your online presence by leveraging the most important factors for visitors and search engines alike.
Ever since 2014, Moz Local looks through the largest search directories, determines whether or not you’re listed, helps with fixing potential issues, and lets you take stock of listings of your business that you haven’t already.
Moz Local works for both small and enterprise businesses, ensuring that your online listings are correct and consistent, which helps to boost website visibility. It is also known for its great automation that many other tools don’t have.
For businesses already using one of the other Moz tools, Moz Local makes even more sense, as you can receive notifications and tackle a variety of tasks throughout your online presence through the Moz interface.
Here are some of the greatest features of Moz Local:
- Ongoing listings sync: Easily keep your listings updated across search engines, online directories, social media, apps, and data aggregators with minimal time and effort—all from a single dashboard.
- Profile optimization: Understand the information and pictures needed to complete your listings and profiles across multiple websites.
- Automated duplicate deletion: Eliminate confusion with our automated process for identifying, confirming, and deleting (not just suppressing) duplicate listings.
- Google and Facebook integration: Publish your local listing information and updates directly to Google and Facebook. Above all, Moz Local enables you to claim your Google My Business listing and sync any changes to your profile.
- Robust review management: Monitor, read, and respond to reviews on multiple sites from a single dashboard. Improve response times with instant alerts of new customer reviews about your business on the major sites.
- Powerful reports and insights: Learn your online presence score and profile completeness, along with sentiment analysis, traffic & clicks.
Cost: At the time of publication, pricing for Moz Local in the USA starts at $14/month for the lite version and $20/month for the most popular version. You can save up to 25% when you pay annually.
#2. BrightLocal
BrightLocal is perfect for smaller businesses who want to rank higher, improve their reputation and generate more traffic and leads from local search.
Trusted by thousands of top brands, local businesses and agencies for its analytics and reporting functions, BrightLocal is definitely one of the best local SEO tools.
It claims to have the most comprehensive local rank tracking that goes beyond basic rank reporting. Moreover, BrightLocal helps you with citation management and review management.
This platform offers several local marketing tools so you know where you rank, why you rank there, and how to rank higher.
The most powerful features of BrightLocal include:
- Monitor and audit local citations: Find local citations, spot NAP (name, address, phone) issues and track citation performance to boost local rankings by spying on your competitors.
- Easy duplicate deletion: Identify damaging duplicate business listings and maintain a spotless citation profile for better rankings.
- Reputation management: Manage and generate customer feedback on key review sites including Facebook and Yelp, and showcase your reviews.
- Google My Business listing optimization: Analyze your GMB data, follow changes and benchmark performance against your competitors.
- Customizable, white-label reports: Get detailed information about local SEO metrics, fix issues and perform better reports, while being fully customizable.
Cost: At the time of publication, pricing for BrightLocal starts at $29/month. If you pay annually, you will pay only 10 monthly payments instead of 12. There is a 14-day free trial option available.
#3. Yext
Yext provides a variety of products and solutions that can help your brand improve local SEO. Thanks to Yext, you can get high search engine rankings and manage your online reputation seamlessly across different search engines and websites.
Their philosophy is that keyword search is the past while AI search is the future. When you switch to Yext, you deliver direct answers instead of a list of hyperlinks.
Yext is known for its fantastic automation options, focusing on AI search—making it perfect for medium- and large-sized businesses that find a lot of value in it. For most small businesses, it is a bit of an overkill as all of this comes at a price.
Take your business to the next level with these features of Yext:
- App directory integrations: Use Yext's pre-built integrations with all the business tools and services you trust to power your search experiences.
- Automated, cutting-edge solution: Forget manual optimization. Yext automatically removes duplicate listings and automatically responds to negative reviews.
- Personalized responses at scale: With Yext, you can craft thoughtful review responses by combining dynamic response building blocks with personalized messaging—not templates.
- Outstanding customer support and training: Yext offers in-person training and training videos in addition to the support, webinars, and forum.
- Website boost: Yext claims to reduce bounce rates of companies by 37% and their customers spend 2.6X more time on site after using Yext site search.
Cost: Pricing for Yext is not publicly released.
#4. ReviewTrackers
ReviewTrackers is an award-winning customer review management platform that gathers all your online reviews. It also sends alerts regarding customer feedback on various review websites, making this information available in one useful dashboard.
Thanks to ReviewTrackers, your business can use customer feedback and reviews to drive your acquisition and retention strategies.
ReviewTrackers helps busy professionals save time, money and resources so they can focus on what matters most to their customers. It was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
This tool is trusted by thousands of companies in the USA for these features:
- Unbeatable reputation management: The platform not only aggregates & tracks reviews from the top directories, but also allows you to respond in-app to Google and Facebook reviews, leveraging smart technology for personalizing your offers.
- Review response automation: Build a personalized response strategy for both positive and negative reviews to inspire brand loyalty, increase customer confidence and improve online search rank.
- Automatic feedback categorization: ReviewTrackers’ proprietary Natural Language Processing engine identifies trends and sentiment across feedback and reviews.
- Actionable competitive insights: This platform offers insights into the competitors’ reviews and online rank to help your brand build strategies to surpass them in local search results, improving brand visibility.
- Integration with 1,000+ apps: Integrate ReviewTrackers data with over 1,000 apps via Zapier, as well as leverage our API, to streamline business processes, automate workflows, and allow for increased flexibility and productivity.
Cost: Pricing for ReviewTrackers is not publicly released. There is a 30-day free trial option available.
#5. Growthbar
GrowthBar is a fantastic local SEO tool that gives you all the important SEO metrics on any website or Google search result.
However, the best part is its Google Chrome extension that allows you to do keyword research, backlink analysis, and PPC analysis without leaving your Google browser.
You can use the tool to track the position of the top keywords of a website, to find local keyword suggestions and identify your local competitors’ best-performing keywords.
Here are the reasons to use GrowthBar for you local SEO:
- Google Chrome extension: With Growthbar, you don’t have to leave the Google browser anymore to get the necessary SEO data.
- AI-driven content: With one click, you can generate content outlines for your blog or website with proper titles, introductions, keywords, word counts, headers, images, links and more.
- Sophisticated keyword research: Track any site’s keyword rankings and get access to billions of keyword suggestions, keyword difficulty scores, and related long-tail keywords—all in delightful dashboards.
Cost:
At the time of publication, pricing for GrowthBar starts at $29/month when paid annually or at $48/month when paid monthly. There is a 5-day free trial option available.
#6. Local SEO Checklist
If you find any of the above solutions costly, then you should try Local SEO Checklist. This tool is free of charge and powered by Synup, another customer acquisition platform for your local SEO needs.
With Local SEO Checklist, you can analyze everything related to Google search: on-page elements, top business directories, customers reviews and testimonials, citations, website content or backlinking.
Based on the data you pick, you can create personalized checklists that will guide you through those parts of your website that need optimization for local search.
In addition to the checklist, you can use this free platform for:
- Website scanner: Scan your business listing across 48 important directories including Google, Facebook, Yelp and more. All for free.
- Google My Business listing optimization: Use this tool to see if your business listing meets Google My Business guidelines.
- Local SEO tips: Local SEO Checklist offers a list of 100 simple tips & tricks to help you navigate your local SEO.
Cost: Free of charge.
Final Thoughts
These 6 local SEO tools can help you improve your online presence and engage with your audience more effectively.
Apart from the local SEO tools mentioned in this article, complex SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush might be valuable resources for your local SEO needs as well.
Moreover, it might be worth tapping into Google products like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Google Analytics or Google Trends. Some of these might not be traditional SEO tools, however, they provide users helpful data.
Besides SEO, don’t forget about content. Content is absolutely crucial for SEO as without it search engines won't have enough data to index your pages correctly and help you rank.
You can either create some content yourself or you can hire a content writer that will do the job for you.
Moreover, if you want to get extra SEO benefits from your social media marketing, then you’ll need to optimize your presence there for maximum visibility across all online channels. There are plenty of social selling tools to help you with that as well.
FINAL TIP: Make sure you try some free trials and check demos of the platforms you like the most. Every local business is unique in its own sense and that is why many business owners take their time when choosing their local SEO tools.
This is a guest post from Iryna Melnyk
Iryna is a digital marketing professional, content writer and a passionate traveler that lives both in Europe and the USA. She is a regular contributor to SocialCommerce Blog and Jose Angelo Studios.
