Local SEO tools help you rank highly for local searches, allowing your local business to appear in search engines when potential customers look for the products or services that you offer. A successful local SEO campaign will also bring in new customers who may have never even heard of your business before.
Table of Contents
Local Seo Software Reviews
Local SEO software enables businesses to promote their products or services to local prospective customers. This type of software helps businesses get listed in the Local 3-Pack, a group of listings at the top of a Google results page in a separate list and accompanied by a map. Local SEO software may perform functions such as sending accurate listings to search engines, tracking local search rankings, monitoring online reviews, and optimizing a company’s Google My Business profile. Local SEO products are often used by smaller organizations with a brick-and-mortar location needing to increase brand awareness and foot traffic.
In addition to local SEO software, businesses may want to take advantage of tools such as content marketing software and social media marketing software to increase customer engagement through other channels. Organizations hoping to boost their local SEO would also find it beneficial to leverage general SEO software or SEO service providers, which can help identify areas of improvement within a website.
To qualify for inclusion in the Local SEO category, a product must:Provide one or more of the following tools: local citation management, local rank tracking, or Google My Business optimizationReport on metrics such as local search ranking, online reputation, and citation scoreFocus on the improvement of a business’ ranking in local search engine result pages (SERPs)
Top 10 Local SEO Software
- Semrush
- Birdeye
- SE Ranking
- Yext
- Vendasta
- Reputation
- Google My Business
- BrightLocal
- Milestone Inc.
- SOCi
Compare Local SEO Software
G2 takes pride in showing unbiased reviews on user satisfaction in our ratings and reports. We do not allow paid placements in any of our ratings, rankings, or reports. Learn about our scoring methodologies.Sort By:The next elements are radio elements and sort the displayed results by the item selected and will update the results displayed.AlphabeticalSatisfactionPopularityG2 ScoreResults: 78Semrush(1,508)4.6 out of 5Entry Level Price:$0Favorite
Semrush is a leading online visibility management software-as-a-service platform. With over 50 products, tools and add-ons across online visibility management, including tools for search, content, social media and market research, data for more than 142 countries, seamless integration with Google and task management platforms, Semrush is a critical solution for all companies who are serious about online presence. Semrush in numbers: – Over 800 million unique domains monitored for 142 ge… Read Semrush ReviewsCompareGet a quoteBirdeye(1,425)4.8 out of 5Optimized for quick responseFavorite
Birdeye is an all-in-one customer experience platform. Over 80,000 businesses use Birdeye every day to attract new leads with Listings, Reviews and Referrals, convert them into customers with Webchat and Payments, and delight those customers with Surveys, Ticketing, and Insights – all in one place. Read Birdeye ReviewsCompareGet a quoteSE Ranking(978)4.8 out of 5Entry Level Price:Starting at $18.60Favorite
SE Ranking is an all-included SEO software that offers all SEO tools needed to successfully complete online marketing projects. SE Ranking is perfect for small business owners, SEO pros and agencies. The software provides a complete set of tools for keyword position tracking and keyword research, website audit, competitor analysis, keyword suggestion and grouping, backlink monitoring, automated professional reporting, and much more. Read SE Ranking ReviewsCompareTry for freeYext(271)4.4 out of 5Optimized for quick responseFavorite
Yext is a search-as-a-service platform that offers a wide range of AI-powered solutions for every business need. Brands of all sizes use Yext to deliver best-in-class search and discovery experiences that convert more business, reduce support costs, and uncover new insight about what matters most to their customers. Founded in 2006, Yext has been designated as a “Leader” in over five G2 categories for consecutive seasons, appears in Forrester’s 2021 Now Tech report on Cognitive Search, and is .Read Yext ReviewsCompareTry for freeVendasta(282)4.5 out of 5Entry Level Price:$97.00Favorite
Vendasta provides an end-to-end ecommerce platform to 60,000+ partners who sell digital products and services to more than 5.5 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) worldwide. These partners include marketing agencies, independent software vendors (ISVs), and media companies. The Vendasta Platform allows these groups to easily adopt new solutions from a marketplace of cloud-based technologies that they can sell under their own brand to their SMB customers. The platform provides AI-driven.
Read Vendasta Revi
ewsCompareReputation(695)4.4 out of 5Optimized for quick responseFavorite
Reputation has changed the way companies improve their customer experience (CX) through customer feedback. Our platform translates vast amounts of solicited and unsolicited feedback data into insights that companies use to learn from and grow – including CX, Operations, and much more. We refer to this process as Reputation Experience Management, a category we created. Thousands of global organizations rely on the patented algorithms behind Reputation Score X™ to provide a reliable index Reputation ReviewsCompareGet a quoteGoogle My Business(263)4.6 out of 5Favorite
Your Business Profile appears right when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search or Maps. Google My Business makes it easy to create and update your Business Profile—so you can stand out, and bring customers in. Google My Business ReviewsCompareBrightLocal(152)4.5 out of 5Entry Level Price:$8.00Favorite
BrightLocal is a dedicated local SEO platform. Its powerful local SEO tools and reports allow agencies and brands to improve local rankings, generate more traffic and leads from local search, and manage reviews/reputation. Over 5,000 innovative agencies and brands like iProspect, Mediacom, Hilton and Ikea trust BrightLocal to improve their local search visibility through its industry-leading platform. These companies achieve this through BrightLocal’s SEO Audits and Reports, Local Listing Ser BrightLocal ReviewsCompareGet a quoteMilestone Inc.(20)4.9 out of 5Favorite
Milestone increases acquisition by enhancing digital experience and content visibility. We do this with a digital experience platform and add to it as much or as little service as you need to help you be everywhere your customers are. We work with major brands and mid-size businesses across industries. Learn how you can leverage our proven approaches at www.milestoneinternet.com or email us at sales@milestoneinternet.comRead Milestone Inc. ReviewsCompareGet a quoteSOCi(377)4.4 out of 5Optimized for quick responseFavorite
SOCi is the marketing platform for multi-location brands. We empower businesses like Ace Hardware, Sport Clips, and Anytime Fitness to scale marketing efforts across all digital channels in a way that’s brand directed, locally perfected, and data connected. As one central place to scale marketing, SOCi makes the impossible possible by enabling top brands and their locations to strengthen and scale their digital presence across limitless local search and social pages while protecting what matter. SOCi ReviewsCompareGet a quoteMoz Local(469)4.3 out of 5Entry Level Price:$14.00Favorite
The Moz Local platform brings a robust local technology solution — driving more accurate listings management, actionable insights, automation of duplicate deletion, and review management. Moz Local will help you to better own and manage your physical location data than ever before. Deeper integrations, more active location management, and automation of previously manual processes will make your life easier.Read Moz Local ReviewsCompareGet a quoteSurefire Local(42)4.8 out of 5Free trial availableFavorite
Surefire Local provides local marketing software for small businesses helping them attract customers, grow profits, and maximize efficiency. Founded in 2010, Surefire Local is the champion of small business owners who feel overwhelmed by the digital world and have been disappointed by marketing agencies in the past. Through its flagship product, Surefire Local Marketing Platform™, small businesses can easily take control of their online presence, execute hyper-local campaigns and gain real-ti…
local seo checklist
1. Register your business with Google Business
Creating a Google Business profile (formerly known as a ‘Google My Business’ profile) takes just a few minutes, and is one of the easiest things you can do to ensure visibility in local search results.
When you set up your profile, you supply your business address to Google. Google then sends a card to your business address containing a PIN which you use to verify the address.
Once that’s done, within a couple of days you should see your business included on the ‘map pack’ that Google displays when users in your area enter a search for your type of service.
Depending on how many other similar businesses in your area have registered with Google Business, you may even find yourself occupying the top spot!
If you run a business which has offices in several locations, you should register those in Google Business too (if you have several locations, you can bulk upload them).
Tip: Give Google all the local information it needs
When setting up your Google Business profile, it’s really important that you provide all the information that Google asks you for, including business category, services, products and opening hours.
This is because the more information that you can supply to Google, the more likely it is to surface your business in local search results and map packs.
As you enter your business information, Google gives you a score for how complete your listing is — try your best to get this up to 100%.
The below video gives you some additional tips on how to improve your local ranking with Google Business.
2. Ensure you’re using the right local keywords for your products and services
It’s extremely important to make sure that the descriptions of your products and services on your website reflect what people are actually searching for in your area.
There’s no point, for example, in referring constantly to ‘automobiles’ throughout your website, when people are actually searching for ‘cars.’
To avoid making these sorts of errors, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. These let you find out what the most popular search phrases for businesses like yours are — and how difficult it will be to rank for them locally too.
Using a keyword research tool, for example, you might discover that there are a lot more searches for “New York Plumber” than “Plumber New York.”
You might also find that ‘New York Plumber’ is considerably more difficult to rank for than ‘Plumber in Queens NY.’
You can use this sort of data to identify your ‘sweet spot’ keyword — a phrase that describes your services accurately but also stands a good chance of performing well for you in search results.
Once you have this phrase, you can optimize your content around it.
Tip: check out our Semrush review, our Semrush pricing guide, our Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison, our review of Ahrefs or our Moz vs Semrush comparison for more information about keyword research tools.
What is a keyword difficulty score?
Search engines generally view links to a web page as ‘votes’ for it (so long as the links in question are genuine, and on high-quality websites). And more of these ‘votes’ can lead to higher search rankings.
Accordingly, keyword research tools look at how many links point to websites that are already performing well in search — and calculate difficulty score based on that.
Most of these tools provide a difficulty score out of 100, with a higher number indicating higher difficulty.
So, for example, ‘New York Times’ would be a keyword with a really high difficulty score, because The New York Times website has millions of websites already linking to it.
3. Ensure your location is referenced in key parts of your site
You should make sure that your home page and any other important pages containing information about your product and service reference your location in four key places:
- Its title tag
- Headings
- Body copy
- Its meta description.
Additionally, it’s worth adding the location in the URL where relevant.
For example, if you ran a chain of curry restaurants, with locations in three parts of London, I’d suggest creating three separate pages with three separate URLs, for example:
www.mycurrysite.com/brixton-curry
www.mycurrysite.com/walthamstow-curry
www.mycurrysite.com/hampstead-curry
It’s important to note that each page should have very distinct copy on it; Google doesn’t like duplicate content and can penalize it in search results.
One thing to bear in mind with this is that you might need to think about how wide to cast the net when referencing your location.
For some businesses — perhaps those offering goods and services in a very specific area — it will make sense to take a ‘hyper-local’ approach — i.e., to use the town or suburb they are based in as a focus keyword.
For others, where there is perhaps less competition for the services they provide, or a desire to sell to customers in a slightly wider geographical area, it might make more sense to reference the name of a county or state in key parts of their site.
Again, keyword research can be your friend here — see above!
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4. Submit your site to high-quality local directories
Submitting your sites to high-quality local directories can significantly boost your position in search results.
First, Google indexes the directory entries — and if the directory is reputable, it may return the directory entry in a high position in search.
This means that even if you are struggling to get a high ranking for a particular URL on your site, you may still get visibility for your business via search results from other sites.
Second, you may get a backlink out of it, which can enhance general performance in search results.
Third, you will make your business more visible to anyone using those directories.
It is very important, however, to only submit your website details to high-quality directories — not all directories are reputable, and submitting your site to the wrong ones can have a negative effect on rankings.
Important: be very consistent with contact details
It’s really important to be very consistent when submitting your business’ contact details to any online directories — always enter them in the exact same way.
This is because engines look for consistent ‘NAP’ citations — ‘NAP’ standing for name, address and phone number — and if they regularly encounter conflicting contact information this can raise a ‘red flag’ about the authenticity of your business, with negative consequences for its visibility in search results.
5. Seek out online reviews — particularly Google ones
Google has this to say about reviews on Google My Business:
“High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.“
Source: Google Business Profile Help
In my view, this is a fairly large hint that Google treats Google Business reviews as a ranking signal.
So, it’s important to encourage any customers who are happy with your product or service to leave a review.
You can use ‘Google Place IDs’ to send your satisfied customers a direct link to a page where they can leave a review – Google provides some useful information on how to do this on its Google Business Help site.
Not only can these reviews help to give you a positive ranking signal, but the little stars beside your business name that appear after a customer writes a review will also help your business stick out from the crowd on Google’s map results.
6. Use Schema’s geographic markup
Schema.org is a collaboration between Bing, Google, Yandex, and Yahoo! that lets you provide them with information that helps their algorithms understand your content better — and provide the most relevant search results.
Adding Schema code to your content also enables these search engines to display ‘extra’ information about it in search results — for example star ratings, pricing information or reviewer details.
Schema offers a particular type of code — ‘geographic markup’ — that lets search engines (and users) know more about your business location, and adding it can have positive implications for your business when it comes to local search results.
So make sure you do!
However, before you go crazy with Schema markup, it’s worth taking a look at Google’s guidelines on how to use it — this will help make sure that you don’t end up doing anything spammy.
For more detailed information on geographic markup and local SEO, I’d suggest taking a look at Search Engine Journal’s article on how to use Schema markup for local SEO, as well as Schema.org’s Local Business section.
7. Build backlinks that occasionally include location in anchor text
Backlinks — links from other sites to yours — are absolutely vital to the general visibility of your site in search results.
This is because Google treats them as ‘votes’ for your website, and rewards websites with larger numbers of links pointing to them with higher positions in search results (so long as the links in question are from relevant, high-quality sites).
As you might expect, backlinks are hugely important to local SEO too.
To boost performance in local search results, you should occasionally encourage anyone kind enough to give you a backlink to include the location of your business in the backlink. This emphasizes the location of your business to search engines.
To go back to our bike shop example, this would simply mean trying to build links to ‘bike shop in Brixton’ instead of ‘bike shop.’
I say ‘occasionally’ because you don’t want to overdo this — too much inclusion of location keywords can come across as spammy, raise red flags to search engine algorithms and result in a penalization.
Finally, it’s a good idea to source local backlinks if possible too (i.e., from businesses that operate near you). This can send a signal to search engines that your site is particularly relevant to a particular geographic area.
Increasing site visibility: a video guide
Ahrefs vs Semrush | Free SEO toolkit | Subscribe on YouTube
8. Create high-quality content that references your local area
Sites that feature in-depth, informative articles on topics that people are genuinely interested in tend to perform well in search results.
This is for two main reasons: first, they tend to be keyword-rich, making it generally more likely that your content matches a variety of search queries.
Second, if they’re particularly good resources, other site owners will create ‘backlinks’ to them, something which, as discussed above, generates higher placements in search results.
The same rules apply to local SEO, so if you write high-quality blog posts about your business niche that involve the geographical area you operate in, you may find yourself doing rather nicely in local search results.
Using our bike shop example (yet again!), a way to get some traction in local search results for bike-related services might be to blog about good cycling routes in the area in which the shop does business.
This increases the chances of cyclists in your area arriving at your blog post and learning not just about a great new cycle route but about the fact that your business services bicycles too…
Conclusion
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