Supercharge Your Local Listings and SEO with These 5 Tools These tools will help you manage your listings and track your performance on search engines over time.
By Pratik Dholakiya Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
From Twitter to Facebook, a lot of big companies are realizing the importance of local businesses and offering them resources to get their business on their platform. The world is open for local businesses; even Google has warmly embraced local businesses, paving an easier path for them through Google+ listings, reviews, citations, etc. However, managing all this is easier said than done.
From ensuring your data is accurate across all directories through selecting the right keywords for your business, things might become difficult for small local businesses who don't have a budget to hire a full-time SEO expert. However, there is a solution in the form of five tools that can help you supercharge your local listings and SEO quickly and easily without the help of an expert:
1. Synup: fix your local citations.
Nothing can spell disaster for local businesses more than inaccurate citations and outdated details. Imagine how dreadful it would be for a local business to have important details like address and phone numbers inaccurately recorded! To add to the tragedy, imagine new local directories fetching the same old data, multiplying wrong, outdated information in several local directories. It is one of the fastest ways to lose business in today's "Let's Google it' times. Synup helps businesses to audit their business listings and determine the accuracy of their details across hundreds of directories. It also helps fix listing errors in no time at all.
Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO
2. BluMenthals: choose the right business category.
Should I list my business as a café, restaurant or bistro? Believe it or not, there are innumerable categories of hotels and a myriad number of other categories such as diners, café, espresso bars, restaurants, bistro, etc. Finding a category which aptly suits your business is tough. On top of it, the local Search Ranking Factors study by Moz cites accurate categorization as an important ranking factor.
That's why BluMenthals helps you find the best category based on the keywords you choose. You type in your service, product, or business model keywords into this tool and it generates a list of best-match pre-set categories from Google's category catalog. You can pick one that suits your business accurately and you are done!
3. WordStream: optimize your listing keywords.
When you furnish your details in local directories, they ask for relevant business keywords to go along with your other details. These keywords help improve your search results. Use WordStream's free keyword tools to find relevant keywords and determine the best keywords that you can rank for. WordStream will show relative frequency, Google search volume and competition for the top 100 keywords, so you can pick and choose niche terms which are relevant but not very competitive to rank for.
Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016
4. Whitespark: build local listings.
No local SEO tool list is ever complete without mentioning Whitespark. One of the biggest challenges for local SEO is to build citations. Whitespark Location Citation Finder helps you find directories where you can list your business and monitor your citation growth for better local search rankings. The Local Citation Finder shows up to 500 citation sources per key phrase, something that no other tool offers as yet. You can even monitor these citations to keep a watch on your own and your competitor's listings.
5. Advice Local: monitor search rankings.
If you are managing multiple locations, it would make sense to go for a comprehensive suit. Advice Local is a professional local SEO software that helps in building directory listings, monitoring reputation across top review sites, citation cleanup and much more.
The tool also helps you manage local listings on major GPS devices, navigation apps, and POI databases, so people can find your business easily. It also allows you to dig into and analyze your local SEO data, so you can fine-tune your SEO campaign. Though this tool caters to SEO agencies and marketers, local businesses with multiple outlets too can benefit from this comprehensive software suite.
Related: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Giants in SEO
All the above-mentioned tools help you manage your listings and track your performance on search engines over time. From cleaning up your citations through to analyzing your SEO performance, you will need these tools every step along the way. And the best part is, all of them are intuitive and easy-to-use, so you don't need to be an SEO expert to get a hang of any of these tools!
