10 Best Local SEO Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings

Local SEO is an essential component of digital marketing, as it enables businesses to maintain a strong online presence. To achieve this, local SEO tools can be incredibly helpful in improving your online visibility and engaging with your target audience. These tools can assist with tracking rankings, offering competitor insights, developing SEO-optimized keywords, monitoring performance, and encouraging customer engagement, among other things. By utilizing these tools, businesses can maximize their local SEO efforts and achieve better results in terms of attracting and retaining customers.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the top 10 local SEO tools you can use to improve your online presence and attract more customers to your business. Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, these tools will help you stay ahead of the competition and reach your target audience more effectively.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a form of search engine optimization that encourages people from specific areas to visit your website and access your services or buy products. It’s a super-effective way to determine your company’s physical parameters and focus your efforts on people searching for businesses like yours within those same geographic locations.

A local SEO strategy usually works with geographical data. The most common local search typically includes a keyword relating to the product or service you sell, and the name of the location. For example, “plumbing Wisconsin.” Another form of local search includes the words “near me,” which changes depending on the user’s location.

How does Local SEO Help Your Business?

If your business only operates in a specific part of your state, or if you’re a small company serving a town or city, then it’s critical you understand the best local SEO tools.

It ensures you are fully prepared to compete against businesses offering similar products and services and helps you connect with local people in the same way that you would have through local directories before the Internet came about!

According to recent statistics, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 50% of local mobile searchers are looking for business information like a local address. Additionally, 18% of local mobile searches result in a sale within one day, and 50% of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a store within the same day, with a similar percentage of those who searched on a computer or tablet. These findings highlight the importance of local SEO services and having a strong online presence for businesses to attract and retain customers.

Why Should Businesses Use Local SEO Tools?

Businesses should use local SEO tools to improve their online visibility, attract more local customers, and stay ahead of the competition. With the right tools, businesses can optimize their website and listings for local search, track their rankings, monitor reviews and citations, and gain valuable insights into their target audience’s behavior. By leveraging these tools, businesses can increase their chances of appearing in the top results of local searches and ultimately drive more traffic, leads, and sales to their business.

10 Best Local SEO Tools in 2023

The following 10 local SEO tools will help you appear on search results pages, and improve your visibility on those pages. They’ll help you establish your business as an attractive option to people searching for businesses like yours, show what you’ve got to offer, and make it easy for people to get in touch with you.

Choose the tools based on your level of visibility, the help you need, and what suits your needs best.

1. Free Review Monitoring

Free Review Monitoring helps you stay on top of customer reviews. Once in a while, most businesses will receive a negative review. If that happens, you want to be able to respond promptly and appropriately. And the same goes for positive reviews.

The benefits of this local SEO tool include:

• Free: Add up to three locations at no cost.
• Review tracking: Automatically track reviews on industry-specific websites, review sites, and various other online platforms.
• Immediate notifications: Receive prompt notifications when new reviews come in, whether good or bad.

2. Local SEO Checklist

Local SEO Checklist is a fantastic tool for those new to SEO. Consider it the ultimate local SEO strategy checklist of all the SEO tactics you need to implement to ensure your business is discoverable by people searching for companies like yours in your local area.

Why you should use this popular local SEO tool:

• Easy to use: The website details each step of the SEO process, making it easy to follow. Once you’ve completed one aspect, you can move on to the next.
• Citation submission services: While local citations (business listings) play an important role in improving local rankings, acquiring them is time-consuming. Local SEO Checklist offers a paid citation service to ensure your business appears across various online directories.
• Downloadable: You can download the checklist for free.

3. Moz Local

Moz Local is one of the best local SEO tools used by many businesses and professional marketing companies. With it, you can improve your online presence and ensure your business listings are accurate. This local SEO software makes it easy to change location data and update your business profile in real time.

It offers other advantages too:

• Automated listing management: Moz will send information to search engines and directories your audience uses most.
• Analytics: This software also provides you with essential KPIs like profile completeness, an online presence score, and Visibility Index.
• Review management: Moz Local allows you to easily monitor, read, and respond to reviews across search engines and websites from a single dashboard.

4. SEO Scout

SEO Scout helps you manage structured data. If you’re unfamiliar with Microdata, HTML, and JSON-LD (coding), there’s no need to worry. SEO Scout will take care of it for you, making sure your site is accurate and working properly according to Google’s guidelines.

SEO Scout is a powerful local SEO tool that offers the following benefits:

• SEO testing: SEO Scout’s testing system allows you to test and analyze potential changes on your website like new titles, meta descriptions, and long-tail keywords.
• Local rank tracker: Track the performance of every local keyword to find new ranking opportunities.
• Identify technical issues: From thin content to poor internal link structure, SEO Scout will help you discover and fix weak points, so you can rank higher in local search rankings.

5. Answer the Public

Answer The Public is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud. It shows you what customers are searching for and the kinds of local keywords you should use to grab their attention.

It’s particularly useful for content creation in the following ways:

• Location-based: Learn how people search based on location.
• The five Ws: Identify what kinds of questions people ask about specific topics (who, what, why, when, where, etc.)
• Optimize content: You can also use this tool for topic ideation, identify key local content opportunities, and optimize existing web pages for the “people also ask” featured snippet on Google.

6. Yext

Yext is a data management tool designed to keep track of your business’s location-related information on multiple directories. It lets you add natural language search experiences to your website and apps, which is particularly useful for voice search queries that are on the rise.

This comprehensive digital platform solution has many impressive features, such as:

• Landing page creation: Publish answers with landing pages built for SEO and conversions.
• Location listings management: Increase your business’ visibility with listings across ~200 search engines, maps, directories, and more.
• AI site search: Yext’s dynamic AI tool reveals what works best on your website, i.e., where your customers do and don’t convert.

7. Serpstat

Another comprehensive local SEO tool, Serpstat allows you to analyze competitors, collect keywords, check backlinks, and perform clustering, and daily rank checking. With Serpstat, you can find out what keywords drive traffic to your website and gain insight into issues that negatively impact your search visibility.

Serpstat offers these benefits, among others:

• Compare metrics: Analyze up to 100,000 keywords or listed domains and compare their most important local metrics.
• Local content management: Automate unique content to attract local customers.
• Review management: Manage reviews, get your average review rate, and find out which reviews need urgent replies.

8. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite designed to help people get higher Google rankings. It’s straightforward to use as well as easy and fast. Although it was originally utilized as a backlink index, today, it offers all the main tools needed to cover local SEO functionality, such as rank tracking and content analysis.

Ahrefs is a great SEO competitive analysis tool that offers:

• Website audits: Crawl all your pages and flag technical SEO issues that prevent your local content from ranking in local search engines.
• Keyword difficulty analysis: Estimate how difficult a keyword is to rank from 0-100.
• Regain lost link power: Ahrefs broken link features allows you to collect and filter all links to your website that are broken, so you can reclaim them.

9. GrowthBar

GrowthBar is an AI content generator and SEO keyword research, tank tracker, and site inspector tool. Powered by superior algorithms, it helps you create new blog posts and web pages while making sure they appear on local search rankings.

GrowthBar is unlike any other content generator tool, and comes with:

• Google Chrome extension: Conduct keyword research, backlink analysis, and PPC analysis without ever leaving your Google browser.
• AI writer: Generate article titles and introductory paragraphs to kick-start your local content writing process.
• Keyword ranking: GrowthBar scours Google search engine results thousands of times per day, so you know your exact keyword ranking at any time.

10. Semrush Listing Management Tool

Semrush’s Listing Management tool was developed together with Yext (see #6 for details). It publishes your important business data across popular directories and services, including Facebook, Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, and many more. By utilizing this local SEO tool, you can update your information once and publish it where people are searching.

As one of the leading local listing management tools, it offers:

• Automatic NAP management: Update your listings from one place.
• Google Business Profile Integration: Sync your data with Google and Facebook.
• 70+ Local directories: Ensure customers always find you.

5 Ways to Improve Local SEO for Free

As well as the above ten local SEO tools, Google offers a series of simple software that helps you manage your keywords and search engine rankings. These free local SEO tools review your local search visibility, analyze audiences and get insights that help you improve in the future.

Let’s take a look.

Sign Up for Google Analytics

Google Analytics is perhaps one of the most powerful tools Google has to offer. It gives you an insight into the performance of your business, analyzing how many users access your site, how many sessions there were, the total number of page views, and even the amount of time people spend per session. This all gives you important data about what people do, the pages they like to visit, and where you could improve. It also offers geolocation analytics, showing you where visitors to your website primarily come from.

If people are accessing your site from another side of the country and the bounce rate is high (meaning they see your site and then quickly leave), then it suggests you need to improve your geolocation data. If people are visiting your site from a specific part of your local region, it gives you an idea of who likes your product most and where you should redirect campaign resources to. It’s one of the most powerful SEO software tools that you should use to keep track of how well your online presence is doing.

Use Google My Business Analytics

Google My Business (GMB) analytics is another powerful, free tool. Consider this a Google Analytics page, but specifically for tracking people who access your website through Google snippets. Those are the entries on search engine results pages that show information about your business, some photographs, and contact details.

Google My Business shows total searches for your business, your average rating from customers who leave reviews on the snippet, your reviews, total views, photo views, and more. It helps you see how many people are interacting with your business on the Google search page and shows you where you might need to do more. If your ratings aren’t great, ask yourself why…and read the reviews!

If your photo views aren’t high…add better photos! And if you’re not getting enough hits, consider whether your local SEO is set up properly.

Take a look at Google Search Console

Google Search Console lets you analyze your geo keywords, as well as set them up. To create new geo keywords which include references to local regions in your city or state, go to the Google Search Console and then choose the website you want to set the keywords for.

On the left side of the page, you’ll see “Search Traffic.” Click that button and then choose “International Targeting.” Then, click on “Country” and select your chosen region. There are other options that are more specific, allowing you to set local keywords and locations. That ensures your business is established as operating in one particular area.

Remember that it can take a couple of weeks in some instances for the geo-target to be updated, so it’s important you get started as soon as possible, so you show up in local SERPs.

Analyze Local SERP Results

So, this isn’t so much a tool as it is a process, a small part of your general SEO checklist. Everyone should understand how SERP analysis works. It’s the process of checking what websites appear when you search the keywords that you focus on or keywords that just generally relate to your business. Surfer SEO is a good tool for this type of analysis. It helps you in monitoring rankings, and you can even use it as a keyword planner tool for future content.

If you’re a plumber in Madison, Wisconsin, search “plumber in Madison, Wisconsin” and see what comes up. If you’re on the list, it means your efforts are working. If you’re not, it either means your efforts are not working or not enough time has passed for the changes you have made to come into effect.

Consider not just the sites that appear in the Google search results, but also the sites that appear in the snippets. Google and similar search engines offer a special feature that allows you to analyze businesses that fit your search criteria. Here, you should examine all the data on your business listing to ensure it is true.

If you are struggling to appear high on these results, you have to work harder at creating a strong local search presence.

Analyze Your Competition

Finally, as part of your SEO efforts, you should always remember to analyze your competitors. Consider the very fact that your competitors are easy to find on Google, the ultimate tool for improving your geo keywords. If your local competitors are appearing higher up in the major search engine rankings than you, take a look at what they’re doing.

Analyze the content on their websites to see what keywords they’re using, and consider whether you could use the same ones, or find new ones that they aren’t taking full advantage of. Some of the best local SEO tools we have introduced in this piece can act as keyword research tools that will help you get a competitive edge.

Check what products and services are best localized based on what your competitors offer.

Do this frequently!

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Need Local SEO Experts? Comrade Got Your Back

The team at Comrade Digital Marketing Agency comprises highly skilled SEO and digital marketing experts who live, breathe, eat and sleep digital marketing — especially local SEO. We’ll be glad to walk you through the most important elements of local search marketing to ensure your business is targeted directly at people who are interested in doing business with you.

Get in touch today, and we’ll talk to you about your web presence, what you can do better, and how to get you more local search visibility with our local SEO solutions.