31 Local SEO Tools You Should Be Using

Success with local SEO requires a skill set that builds on top of general SEO requirements. A toolset built specifically for global SEO isn’t necessarily well equipped for dealing with local SEO concerns. For that reason, we’ve collected 31 free and paid tools below that can help you achieve local SEO results.

Free Tools

1. LocalSEOChecklist: A free interactive checklist of 30 items to handle in order to make sure that your local SEO is doing well. Includes links to elaborate on each checklist point, as well as the ability to check off which items have been completed. Simple, but a useful free tool to keep your local SEO efforts organized.
2. CopyScape: Businesses with multiple locations often end up producing a large number of pages targetted separate locations, but using the same content on each page. Duplicate content like this can dilute your rankings and in some cases earn you a search engine penalty. CopyScape allows you to determine if any pages are duplicated.
3. WhiteSpark Offline Conversion Tracker: A free form that you can use to track conversions that happened at a local store and sends the data to Google Analytics. Asks customers how they heard about your store’s location.
4. Blumenthals Category Search: A free tool that you can use to find local categories associated with a keyword.
5. 51 Blocks Free Tools: Includes six free checklists and five free tools, including a local SEO checklist, a schema creator, and an SEO audit.
6. FreeReviewMonitoring.com: This free tool sends you notifications about new reviews via email. Includes a widget that you can use to embed your best reviews on your site.
7. Census Bureau Toolkit: A list of tools that you can use for local market research by accessing demographic information. Use it to access economic data, population stats, income data, etc.
8. BrightLocal Search Results Checker: A free tool that allows you to see the search results from a different location by entering a city or zip code. Bear in mind that the tool can’t get as specific as the precise geolocation of a cell phone.
9. Siteliner: A free tool to find broken links and duplicate content on your site, good for sites with a large number of location pages that may have duplicate content issues.
10. Seoptimizer Chrome Plugin: A chrome plugin that allows you to check your on-site SEO and receive a report on what you may need to work on. While this isn’t strictly for local SEO, it’s especially useful if you are operating several different sites for multiple locations that may be using different on-site templates with different SEO issues.
11. TheHoth Review and Reputation Audit: A free tool that sends you a report of your business’s online reviews. Reports the overall rating and the percentage breakdown of star ratings.
12. Notify.ly: A free mention notification tool. Let’s you know when your brand gets mentioned on social media. Get notifications about your brand or your competitors. Notification sources include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, blogs, and more. Receive your notifications via Slack or Hipchat.
13. GeoRanker: A limited free rank tracker with a local SEO focus that includes the ability to track rankings in real time at your desired locations, locate citations for your business, and measure keyword density. The full version includes more in-depth capabilities.
14. RavenTools Schema Creator: Easily create schema.org structured data to give the search engines more information to work with for the purposes of rich snippets and providing them with local data.

Paid Tools

15. WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder: Designed to help you find places where you can list your business in trustworthy listings. It includes tracking to monitor your citation growth. Comes with a local keyword tool, competitor identification and analysis of their citations.
16. BrightLocal: A collection of local SEO tools available in a variety of packages. Features include the ability to compare your local search performance against your competitors, identify where your competitors have earned citations, stay notified of new reviews, submit your information to aggregators and applications, and claim, update, and submit to business listings.
17. Moz Local: Streamlines the process of setting up your local profiles and getting them verified on Google and Facebook, and distributes your listing to data aggregators. Notifies you if any of your citations have errors that need to be updated. Lists what categories you show up for and which media have cited you.
18. Yoast Local SEO For WordPress: A WordPress plugin to optimize your site for local SEO. Uses the appropriate schema.org markup for your contact information, embeds a Google Maps plugin on your contact page, and allows you to optimize multiple locations.
19. Serpstat: Serpstat is a general purpose SEO tool for position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, site auditing, and keyword research. The keyword research tool, in particular, is especially useful for local SEO because allows for advanced filtering, including the ability to only include keywords that return maps in the search results.
20. CustomerLobby: Uses AI to identify which customers are in need of service and automatically sends them emails and postcards to provide them with timely service, then follows up with them requesting reviews.
21. SweetIQ: Analyzes your local data to recommend listings that are the best fit for your business. Manage your local listings and review notifications. Automatically detect your store locations and set up websites for each location with dedicated microsite software.
22. GetFiveStars.com: Automates the customer feedback process to encourage user reviews as well as determine your Net Promoter Score and earn testimonials. Automatically reach out to customers and ask them about their experience.
23. Synup: Automatically crawl, submit, and synchronize your listings across 100 trusted local directories, receive notifications when your brand earns a review or picks up a mention on social media, use local analytics to monitor how each location is performing, and take advantage of simple reporting tools.
24. ReviewTrackers: Monitor your online reviews and measure how customers are reacting to your business. Sends notifications when new reviews go up online on over 100 platforms including Google, Facebook, and TripAdvisor. Automatically ask your most satisfied customers for reviews. Track local SEO performance.
25. BuzzStream: This tool is designed to help businesses build relationships with influencers for online marketing and link building purposes. While it isn’t built specifically with local businesses in mind, it makes earning links to your local sites easier by allowing you to easily discover influencers, communicate with them, and keep track of the results of those communications.
26. Locu: Manage your menus, business listings, item photos, product listings, and service lists in one place, then automatically update that information to platforms like Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, Bing, and Foursquare.
27. Placeable: Manage and automatically sync your location data, develop local landing pages, set up geo-targeted advertising, and manage your listings.
28. TrustPilot: This review platform makes it easy to automatically solicit reviews from your customers, using integrations with Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and PrestaShop. The platform also integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, the reviews contribute toward Google Seller Ratings, and plugins are available for rich snippets. The platform itself has good reviews from customers, and enterprise businesses have access to an API that expands its capabilities.
29. Google Structured Data Testing Tool: Use this free Google tool to verify that your structured data is set up properly.
30. Yext: Allows you to sync your business data across hundreds of listings including Google and Google Maps, Alexa, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, and Facebook. Collect reviews from your customers, and monitor and respond to new reviews, which you can monitor with sentiment analysis. Includes analytics for your pages, listings, and reviews.
31. Manual Geolocation Chrome Plugin: This plugin allows you to override your browser geolocation so that Google’s search results will be based on a different location than where you are physically located. This allows you to see what local search results look like at the appropriate location.