4 Great Tools for Making the Most of Local SEO for Your Business If you want local customers to come across your business, this is what you need to do.
By Pratik Dholakiya Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Did you know 85 percent of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses? Yes, consumers are going local, making it more important than ever for you to increase your visibility amongst your local target audience.
Local SEO is key here. Leverage its potential to the hilt if you want local customers to come across your business. It's imperative that you get your local SEO strategy absolutely right so that your business scores a consistently high rank on local search engine results pages (SERPs).
Related: 7 Creative Link-Building Techniques to Improve Your Website SEO
Local SEO is tough, and you need to get experts on board to come up with an effective campaign; you also need to use tools for staying on top of your local SEO strategy. These tools easily help you implement actions that are a part of your local SEO plan.
Let's take a closer look at four such tools:
1. Synup
Wondering whether all that time spent claiming listings has been worth it? Whether all information is error free and your business profile on every site is accurate? Evaluating each listing manually will take a lot of time and effort. This is where Synup enters the picture. It helps you crawl, claim and fix listings.
It also offers you a single dashboard for tracking customer reviews so you can keep an eagle eye on what customers are saying about your brand. It's important to remember that reviews and listings are critical local search ranking factors, so get them right. Synup helps you do that and more.
Related: Why SEO Is Much Easier Than You Think
2. Moz Local
Think SEO, think Moz. It's no wonder that one of the best tools for local SEO comes from Moz's stable. This tool makes the process of updating listings completely hassle free. Just share your location information and Moz Local will push this data to reputed online directories and top-tier data aggregators in the business.
Your business's local listing is a mission critical element of your local SEO strategy and you can't afford to go wrong with it. Moz Local is a handy tool that helps you take charge of your business listings.
3. Whitespark's Local Citation Finder
In order to improve local search rankings, you need to build local citations. The problem is there are a huge number of citation sources available on the web, so how do you search for them and more importantly, how do you know which citation source is a good pick for your business?
Sounds like a tough task doesn't it? Well, it is, but made simpler by the Location Citation Finder. All you need to do is enter a key phrase and search for citation sources. It also helps you identify high-quality citation sources and conduct a competitive analysis of successful businesses in your niche and their citations. This tool makes very sure that you don't take an incorrect step with your listings.
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4. BrightLocal's Local Search Rank Checker
You need to constantly monitor your local SEO campaign and its efficacy. This is where the Local Search Rank Checker enters the picture. It gives you the low down on your organic and local rankings on search engines like Google, Google Local/Maps, Bing, Bing Local etc. You could even track search results for specific locations, if your objective is to rank for multiple locations. The whole idea behind using this tool is to ensure your campaign and its deliverables are on the right track.
If you find the results are not to your liking, initiate course correction immediately. With this tool, there is very little ambiguity (if any) as to whether a local SEO campaign is performing as per expectations.
These five tools are easy to use and help you maximize the potential of local SEO for your business. They also help you save a lot of time, which can be spent in further strengthening your brand across the online and offline space.
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