Local SEO is becoming a vital strategy for businesses with physical locations because local competition has increased.
In fact, maintaining an online presence is essential for every business, no matter how small or big they are and how many stores they have at what location(s).
You need to show up in the search results because that’s exactly where modern customers hang around the most if they wish to buy some product/service.
According to a report, 46% of all Google searches seek local info, and 97% of total search engine visitors perform online searches to find local businesses.
This means if you are not taking local SEO seriously, you are leaving lots of money on the table for others. And I’m sure you would never like that.
Don’t worry; this is where local SEO can help you improve your search ranking across different search engines and sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Alexa, etc. It can optimize ranking factors, including customer reviews, contact details, etc., to bring you more leads and customers.
But what is local SEO anyway?
Let’s understand it and see how it can help you.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an effective SEO technique that you can use to improve a local business’s search engine visibility. It emphasizes certain best practices that businesses can embrace to optimize their organic traffic from customer searches performed within nearby areas.
Search engines depend on key aspects such as social profiles, local content, citations, page links, and reviews to collect data for local search and then showcase the relevant results to a user when they ask a question.
Local SEO helps businesses leverage this data and position their products/services in front of local customers.
Similarly, local SEO software works on the principle of local SEO to help businesses promote their offerings to local customers. Using the software, you can list your business, track search engines locally, monitor customer reviews online, and optimize your Google My Business profile.
Local SEO software is excellent for small, brick-and-mortar businesses like grocery stores, bars, restaurants, clinics, law offices, and many others.
How can Local SEO help you?
Local SEO can help your business in many ways, including:
Easy business listing
Using local SEO software, you can easily list your business for free, especially after the advent of Google My Business.
Increasing online visibility
When someone in your area searches for something on Google or other search engines related to your products/services, they can find your business quickly. This way, it helps improve your online visibility and lets visitors know more about your business with a completed profile, product images, reviews, and more.
Tracking accurate metrics for growth
Local SEO software helps you track your SEO performance by calculating the number of clicks, leads, conversions, how many leads came through what channel, and more.
It also provides detailed reports and analytics that you can use to improve weak areas and grow your business more.
Higher conversions
With a solid online presence, you can get more leads as most users nowadays search online before purchasing. And when they can see your shop with relevant products/services, complete address, and other details written along with a map showing, they can visit you easily. Therefore, with more leads, there is a higher probability of conversions.
Understanding your customers
You can read online customer reviews to understand more about your customers and their expectations. It helps you shape your products and services in a way that can address customer pain points and results in better consumer satisfaction and business growth.
Now that you know what local SEO is, check out these local SEO tools to improve your online visibility and conversion rates.
SEMrush
Craft the perfect strategy for local SEO with SEMrush to improve your service visibility, land more leads, boost your site traffic, and track business growth. It helps in the automatic distribution of your business data to authoritative directories and manages listings.
Follow your local rank progress over a Zip-code level while monitoring your reviews across different directories. You can also track your online performance per day using their Position Tracking tool. It can monitor device types and keywords and helps you track competitor domains as well.
Enhance your SEO rankings by thoroughly analyzing industry trends and competitor strategies within your industry. In addition, you can prioritize extensive to-do lists to cast better impact in less time. SEMrush helps you improve your social media performance across different platforms apart from scheduling and posting updates on various online channels such as Google My Business.
SEMrush comes with an impressive toolkit that further helps boost your site’s organic reach, comprising of:
- 3 tools for SERP tracking that can improve your site’s performance for search engine results on Google
- 6 tools for keyword research to get fresh ideas on optimizing your online strategy and keyword targeting
- 3 tools for technical SEO to check the site’s technical health and fix errors and glitches
Moz
The robust local SEO tools and reputation management solution by Moz helps you maximize your business’s online visibility so you can reach more potential customers. It does so by leveraging essential factors that influence search engines and visitors.
Moz can create an accurate listing of your business on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc., and then manages and syncs it effortlessly. As a result, people can find your business quickly and become your loyal customers.
The tool updates your listings across different search engines, social media platforms, online directories, data aggregators, and applications with minimal effort and time using a single, user-friendly dashboard.
Their automated identification, confirmation, and deletion of duplicate listings eliminate confusion. Moz also helps profile optimization with proper photos and data while automating local listing distribution across partner sites. Get solid review management by monitoring, reading, and replying to reviews across multiple websites using one dashboard.
Handle negative feedback quickly and assure them of a better experience to retain customers. Optimize response times using instant notifications and alerts on customer reviews regarding your product/service across leading websites. Additionally, monitor trends, review sentiments, customer feedback, and keywords in the reviews to enhance your performance.
Engage with customers easily by posting profile updates quickly with the help of Moz. It also helps you improve your listings and conversion rates with rich content, including special offers, photos, compelling service/product descriptions, sharing news, Q&As, etc.
Integrate with Facebook and Google to publish local listing data and quick updates directly. In addition, Moz offers local reporting features like visibility index, profile completeness, and online presence score to help you take suitable actions. Also, track review performance, calculate online sentiment, and measure how users reached you online via phone searches, driving directories, traffic, impressions, and clicks.
BrightLocal
Score high rankings, stand out your business in local search, and enhance your reputation with BrightLocal. It is a complete solution to monitor, improve, and audit your local SEO so you can make better decisions and save time.
The tool lets you monitor your rankings at the postal code or city level and compares for hundreds of locations in a single report. You can also benchmark your page rankings against the competitors and discover local search volumes to target the best keywords.
Using Local Search Grid, view your local search visibility and find opportunities for outranking your competitors. Also, track progress and react quickly to a drop showing a single metric like ‘Average Map Rank.’ BrightLocal also identifies spam profiles in Google My Business.
Their Local SEO Audit lets you spot site optimization opportunities immediately by analyzing over 300 data points per minute with ease. It also helps you win more customers and impress your existing clients with accurate white-label audits.
BrightLocal offers Google My Business Audits to help you uncover competitor insights and categories they use on GMB. You can also compare your rank with them against crucial ranking factors for improvement. In addition, you can quickly figure out duplicate listings and make informed decisions using 3x more information.
Use their Citation Tracker to discover citation-building scopes while tracking and managing local citations. It also helps you find out harmful, inaccurate, or duplicate citations needing fixing. Furthermore, please keep your eyes on your competitors and see where you are not listed, but they are and track your citation growth weekly.
The Reputation Manager lets you monitor major review websites and generate reviews via SMS and email campaigns. Moreover, it enables you to respond to customer reviews directly to Facebook and Google and convert more visitors using the reviews widget.
BrightLocal is cost-effective; its pricing starts at $1.50/location per month.
Google My Business
Use Google My Business to engage with your customers for free on Google. It offers much more than just business listing; it allows you to connect with people easily across Apple Maps and Google Search.
Compel more customers by showcasing an excellent and informative business profile that explains what your customers can expect of you. You can upload images and offers on your profile and make it stand out while giving a bunch of reasons to visitors to choose you.
Provide visitors different ways to connect with you, such as messaging, calling, or leaving comments or reviews to learn their needs and offer suitable solutions with your offerings.
Google My Business helps you uncover how many visitors are contacting you on Google by tracking your engagement metrics such as calls, clicks, follows, bookings, and more. In addition to that, it lets you understand your customers better by keeping track of who connects with you on Google.
Whitespark
Gain more customers and leads from Google with the help of Whitespark that helps you improve your rankings, track your growth, and drive business in local search using managed citation and valuable tools.
Whitespark’s tools can help you enhance your online presence, manage local search, and win customers by building citations, monitoring rankings, and earning more positive reviews. Also, their Local Rank Tracker tracks your site’s SERPs accurately on Bing and Google across a city through the local finder, maps, and local pack.
The Reputation Builder helps grow your digital reviews, testimonials, and customer feedback with ease without annoying your customers. Furthermore, their Location Citation Finder can discover key citations quickly that your competitors have, which can help enhance your local rankings.
Their Google My Business (GMB) experts can convert your Google listings into high-performing, converting tools and help you win more customers. Thus, you can gain a competitive advantage and stand out with Whitespark.
You don’t need to pay a subscription fee or spend money on renting local listings; instead, use their Yext replacement service to avail a comprehensive clean-up and audit on leading sites. They also offer additional local, city, or industry-specific listings to grow your business more.
Nightwatch
Whether you want to optimize your search engine ranking on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Map Pack, or YouTube, Nightwatch can help you. Apart from search engines, it also enables you to track rankings across desktop and mobile.
It can provide you with automatic keyword finding and ranking updates daily to help you stay ahead of your competitors. Nightwatch leverages a precise approach to track both global and local rankings inside a single solution.
Their approach also enables them to access any data center of a search engine and from anywhere while ensuring minimum data anomalies but high accuracy for reliability. You can learn when your website or business shows up in maps or organic listings when someone searches for your product/service globally or locally.
Nightwatch lets you view different aspects of your keyword performance across various stages in the funnel. You can find opportunities to expand your website’s search visibility, and the tool does all the hardships to show SERP placement you can rank for locally and globally.
Nightwatch combines data from different search and SEO sources out of Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, Search Console, and other SEO sources. You can also use additional data, including YouTube rank tracking and mobile rank tracking data.
Build easy-to-understand and beautiful white-labeled reports with their drag-and-drop user interface. Furthermore, you can save time with automation for when and how the reports are delivered to you or your clients.
Nightwatch lets you discover, monitor, analyze your backlink quality with the number of total backlinks, status, diversity, and filter results quickly. You can also use their Site Auditor to view broken links, tags, pages, etc., and discover hundreds of rank-enhancing keywords with their Keyword Discovery tool.
Birdeye
Rank higher with the help of Birdeye so people can find you quickly and you can grow your business more. It helps you track, manage, and update information for 1000s of different locations easily by using an effortless dashboard.
Birdeye helps you improve your ranking across Google, Facebook, Alexa, Maps, Bing, Yahoo, Whereto, My Local Services, ezlocal.com, Local Stack, and others to increase your web traffic and lead volume. With API integrations, push-button connectivity can synchronize your business listing to vital websites in a click.
Birdeye also offers rich dashboards and reporting to show insights across different channels and locations to monitor your call volume, traffic, and keyword rankings and identify red flags immediately.
Birdeye has got your back no matter what the conditions are like a pandemic, website technical issues, power outage, and so on. It lets you respond to unexpected events quickly in real-time with its fantastic features and functionalities.
Whether your business is in 10k locations or just 10, Birdeye lets you manage your listings, adding locations, and updating work hours effortlessly with simple point-and-click to post. Besides, save time as the tool can update listings automatically across platforms and sites.
Birdeye offers a complete Experience Marketing solution, which is useful significantly for multi-location businesses. Under this, you get CRM integrations, open APIs, AWS power, and GDPR & HIPAA compliance to focus on growing your business.
Yext
Get high search engine rankings and manage your online reputation seamlessly across different search engines and websites with the help of Yext. Control your online business using the Yext Search Experience Cloud while delivering official answers when customers search and ask questions.
Create a Knowledge Graph for your business to answer complicated questions. You can also connect it with 175 3rd-party platforms such as Facebook, Google, Apple Maps, Amazon Alexa, Zendesk, HubSpot, Tableau, Domo, and more.
Use Yext Answers to answer a question directly on your site and offer a conversation experience to visitors on your site or app. As a result, customers or visitors can find the exact answers, and you can understand their expectations, reduce support expenditure, and increase conversion rates.
Garner potential visitors using landing pages optimized for search results, driving conversions, and responding to customer questions. You can use them for restaurants, stores, advisors, doctors, events, FAQs, etc.
View how and where visitors interact with your business by tracking total conversions, brand impressions, and clicks. This way, you can understand what your visitors are looking for and compare it to your competitors.
Local SEO Best Practices
- Optimize your Google My Business profile
- Conduct local SEO audits
- Optimize online citations and directories
- Create engaging content on GMB and social media
- Ensure your online details are consistent and accurate across all channels
- Improve internal links, URL, meta description, headers, and title tags
- Build relationships with other business in your domain
- Win inbound links with high authority and relevance
Conclusion
Online presence is crucial for every business, whether you are online or have a brick-and-mortar store. Use these local SEO tools to improve your business visibility, track metrics, and gain more leads and conversions.
