Best Local SEO Tools Compared and Reviewed by Crazy Egg

Among the eight options we review below, Semrush Listing Management is our favorite local SEO tool. Semrush is a well-known keyword research platform that carries its strengths over to local SEO campaigns through the Listing Management tool. Its well-rounded set of features help local businesses maximize the time and money they spend to achieve results. It also can monitor the performance of your local competitors, allowing you to tweak your strategy on the fly.

Top Local SEO Tools: Golden Eggs

To highlight the best local SEO tools for the broadest array of users, we designated four of these brands as our Golden Eggs.

Semrush Listing Management delivers a lot of SEO versatility, giving you the best value for your subscription. You can try it out by checking your local listings for free.

Synup helps you quickly set up local SEO campaigns, so you can spend more time focusing on improving other aspects of your online presence. Test drive Synup today with a free trial and demo.

Yext excels at maintaining consistency and accuracy for your brand across all online directories. Run a free business scan to get started.

Whitespark is a strong tool for managing your local citations, ensuring consistency among local directories and improving your brand’s reputation. You can sign up for Whitespark for free.

Local SEO Tools Review Process

As we worked through our research into the best local SEO tools, we focused on the top options in light of a few different use cases. These use cases represent the common needs for one of these platforms and the features that are most important for fulfilling those needs. 

We examined many brands and reviewed eight below in light of these four scenarios for needing a local SEO tool:  

By doing this, we hope to make it easy for you to find the products that pertain most to your needs and wants. If one of those use cases sounds a lot like the situation you’re in, you can head to that set of reviews and examine our favorite options for solving that aspect of local SEO. 

Or, browse all of our reviews below and see how some tools deliver unique features and benefits that can help your own local SEO campaigns.

The Best Local SEO Tools for Managing Reviews and Citations

Tools focusing on local SEO should help you monitor what your neighbors are saying about you and request new reviews from customers. Local citations are highly important, too. You want NAP (name, address, and phone number) data that are consistent across all your business listings or you risk missing out on customers who get bad info from one of them.

Semrush Listing Management

Leaving negative reviews of your business unanswered can really hurt customer trust in your local brand. With Semrush Listing Management, you receive a message whenever a poor review appears. You then can seek to alleviate the customer’s problem or provide an apology or other appropriate response. 

Semrush also guides you through the process of requesting reviews from your customers after they make a purchase from you. Customers who love your service but who don’t leave reviews don’t help you draw in new customers.

When it comes to managing your local citations, Semrush Listing Management monitors them on a regular basis for you and ensures all information in the citation is accurate. Should the source site, such as a local directory, misspell your business name or list an old phone number, Semrush helps you seek a correction. 

Additionally, Semrush Listing Management tracks down all the local directories that serve your area. If your business is not already a part of any of these, Semrush helps you seek a listing in it. Simply put, Semrush is one of the best SEO tools available.

Surfer Local

With Surfer Local’s Business Local Citations tool, you can easily keep an eye on any mentions of your business on online directories and the internet at large and make sure the information is accurate. Keeping those dispersed sources of information up to date can give you a boost in local rankings on Google searches down the road.  

Surfer Local also finds areas where your competitors have a listing, giving you the chance to also request listings on those sites, too. Finding new business directories that can highlight your business for their user base becomes far easier with Surfer Local’s ability to find them for you rather than simply searching on your own.

Surfer Local includes a tool for managing Google reviews that can help you automate customer replies. By responding quickly to any reviews, good or bad, you’ll likely leave a better impression on those reading them. Your responses will show other potential customers that you care and are engaged with past customers.

Rio SEO

Rio SEO delivers strong features for managing and engaging with your customers’ reviews in its centralized dashboard. This platform can help you monitor big review sites like Google and Yelp, locally minded sites like CitySearch and Local.com, and even industry-specific directories and the Better Business Bureau. 

The software generates data regarding your review rankings, so you can see at a glance which areas or venues your business listing and reputation management needs improvement.

The Rio SEO dashboard simplifies the process of responding to customer reviews. Rather than moving from website to website to respond to reviews individually, you can do everything from the Rio dashboard, plus receive alerts when Rio SEO finds new reviews so you can respond quickly.

The Best Local SEO Tools for Hyperlocal Keyword Tracking

If you are running a website where you rely on local search to bring in customers, you must focus your SEO campaigns on winning the search engine ranking game for those localized keywords. A key consideration here is SEO tools that help you perform well in Google searches that include “near me.” Getting granular with it is important, too, helping you win searches involving specific neighborhoods or ZIP codes.

Yext

Yext is a powerful tool that is a lot more than just SEO. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Yext’s Intelligent Search Tracker can handle granular, hyperlocal SEO at scale.

For multi-location local businesses, Yext can help you treat each location separately in terms of hyperlocal keyword searches. The tracker tool allows you to measure search results location by location and can even drill down to the ZIP code level.

You may have a business that offers specific products or services depending on the neighborhood. Understanding how you are performing in online searches in these small areas can help you determine the best way forward with your SEO campaigns.

Yext greatly simplifies measuring your results by offering query templates. Specify the keywords you want to measure, then specify the locations you want to use with your keywords. Yext puts together every potential combination from the two lists to give you access to tons of useful information with minimal time and effort required.

GeoRanker

GeoRanker delivers a local rank checker and tracker tool that monitors your performance in searches involving certain locations based on keywords you define. This can be a huge aid in determining what works and what doesn’t with the different cities you do business or have a location in.

Search your keyword rankings city-by-city with GeoRanker separating results appropriately. You can then easily export these results as PDF or Excel reports. GeoRanker’s reports can also be automated, allowing you to set whether they are generated and sent daily, weekly, or monthly. 

GeoRanker also does a good job of helping you track keyword searches in a general manner. You can monitor your competitors, find ideas for keywords you may want to attack, and get suggestions from GeoRanker on how to use keywords in content based on what you already have on your site.

The Best Local SEO Tools for Free Monitoring and Rank Tracking

Look, it can be tough for your small, local businesses to justify spending cash on hand on SEO management. Finding local SEO tools that offer some features for free can be a boon. Fortunately, some providers offer limited forms of their platforms or specialized tools you can use completely for free. 

Whitespark

Whitespark provides three free local SEO-related tools that help you guide or boost your efforts. You also have the option of taking advantage of a 14-day free trial period for the Whitespark paid platforms.

One of the most interesting free tools from Whitespark is a local SEO checklist. Simply create a free Whitespark account and get key insights into your business’s local SEO health. You’ll get a report of the top-ranking factors and a to-do list of key items to address to get your online profile where it needs to be.

You can also get a Google review score and an analysis of your number of reviews and average rating on several of the top review sites important to your business and its reputation. And, if you find you need to generate more positive Google reviews, Whitespark also offers a free Google review short link generator, letting you easily share a customized URL to ask customers to leave their thoughts on your business.

BrightLocal

With BrightLocal, small businesses can take advantage of its two-week free trial period and a few other free features to gain an idea of how you are performing in local SEO. 

BrightLocal’s audit process incorporates hundreds of data points to point out areas where you can make some changes to improve your results. This can help you figure out which keywords and campaigns you should focus on from a local perspective. You can tap into this on your free trial.

Or, try out one of BrightLocal’s four free tools. You can scan your listings across 15 sites for a health score, run test Google searches in custom locations to see if your local SEO efforts are paying off, get alerts to fluctuations in Google ranking that come from algorithm adjustments, and generate short links for Google reviews and Place IDs. All of these are completely free to use and together can give you tons of valuable insights you’d assume you’d have to pay for.

The Best Local SEO Tools for Building Trust on Social Media

Although some disagreement exists on just how much social media successes or failures directly affect local SEO results, social media still remains a key part of any strategy. Google, for example, doesn’t crawl social media posts. However, through reviews and mentions of your business on social media directly from your neighbors, your business can enhance its local reputation in the eyes of customers. 

Synup

Synup helps you enhance your social media presence and performance. Many of Synup’s tools can generate reports on how social media mentions are affecting your business’s reputation and trustworthiness, and you can make adjustments based on that information as needed.

There are multiple features that work toward increasing brand consistency on social media, too. Rather than telling one story on Facebook and generating a completely different feeling on Twitter, you will have a consistent message and identity across all social media platforms by managing it all through Synup. 

Gather and track social media reviews by tapping into Synup’s ability to use natural language processing to identify pressing issues, making it easier to respond appropriately in an instant. Additionally, Synup can help you build content libraries that simplify the process of creating social media posts and guide you through the process of crafting posts that interest your followers, enhancing engagement.

Semrush Listing Management

Creating a consistent message across all your social media channels is an important aspect to enhancing your brand’s reputation and, in turn, your local SEO efficacy. Semrush Listing Management is a strong option for managing your local citations for consistency, and it does the same thing with your social media accounts.

You won’t have different information on Twitter than you have on Facebook, for example, when you are running special hours during a holiday sale. Old information on one social media site could lead to confusion among your customers, but you’ll avoid that issue entirely with Semrush Listing Management.

Additionally, Semrush offers a Social Media Inbox tool that collects responses and inquiries from your various accounts in one place. You can then use the Semrush dashboard to answer messages. When you respond in a timely manner to social media messages from potential customers, your brand’s trustworthiness naturally increases.

Further Reading

Running local SEO campaigns and tracking your business’ presence in local search results is easier when using these tools, but it still requires time and effort on your part. We have additional information you can use to make the most of your time and money in developing better local SEO results and improved traffic for your local business website.