The power of Local Search is underestimated by store owners. Around 46% of all Google searches are looking for “near me” or “local” qualifiers. According to Google, 76% of customers who search for something local will visit your store within a day. If your business is in front of these local searches, potential customers could be walking through your door any minute.
Ranking in front of local qualifiers requires you to do a local SEO. When someone searches for a piece of information in search engines, local SEO provides search results relevant to their current location. Local SEO will help you optimize your business for local search and increase organic traffic, leads generation and brand awareness. This guide will inform you of the benefits of local SEO, factors influencing your choice of local SEO software and some of the best local SEO software in the market.
Contents
What Are The Benefits Of Using Local SEO Software?
When you implement proper local SEO software, you can produce several desirable benefits such as:
Higher search engine rankings
Local SEO increases your page ranking and visibility. It uses a set of unique ranking signals such as the person’s location, NAP citations, Star Rating and keywords to position your website as more relevant to the person searching.
Massive Organic Traffic
Local SEO allows grabbing a significant amount of organic traffic, leads, and in-store traffic. In today’s traffic-driven marketplace, it helps more people find your store and make purchases. Ultimately leading to an increase in sales revenue.
Stronger Outreach
Local SEO provides end-to-end outreach to help you stay organized and grow your digital relationships. Using local SEO software, you can reduce the time you spend managing spreadsheets and building links as local SEO software eases your search for prospects to significant outreach.
What Factors Make A Good Local SEO Software?
Great local SEO software should demonstrate the right features and qualities to improve your business ranking in the areas where it matters most. Here are some factors you should be looking for.
Keyword Research
When people are looking for a local business or products, they focus on transactional search keywords. Suppose your local SEO software can discover thousands of such keywords with accurate search volume numbers. In that case, your business can use the information to create contents that can easily grab customer’s attention. It is better to be sure that the Local SEO software quickly finds and prioritizes the best keywords.
Website Audit
Local SEO is an ongoing process and requires website audits. A Website Audit analyzes your website by performing a comprehensive audit to see where your business website stands. It also includes what the business owner can do to improve the areas that are coming up short and helps you make your site more accessible.
Check up on local SEO software to see if they provide a full-service website audit for your business or not.
Reporting
Correct data helps you make the most effective decisions. If Local SEO software offers an excellent reporting tool, you can quickly build deep insight into your outreach. You can understand how your leads are progressing in your sales funnel.
After a glance at KPIs, you will know where you are falling. So always go for local SEO software that provides customized reporting tools according to your business needs to get the most valued data visualization.
Change Tracking
Local SEO is constantly changing. The best Local SEO software provides you regular updates on the trending campaigns and relevant changes that might affect their business.
They’ll notify you proactively to ensure everything is perfectly operating and also about new prospects. Your local SEO software should be able to track changes and make adjustments accordingly. Double-check if it uses up-to-date strategies and incorporates the changes.
The Best Local SEO Software
Here you will explore some of the best local SEO software you can leverage to improve your business ranking.
BrightLocal
BrightLocal is an all-in-one local SEO tool specifically built for local business marketing needs. It’s best for you if you already have an implementation plan that you’re going to follow. If you’re running a business, this tool not only checks your rank in search engines but helps you to rank higher and build the best online reputation for your business.
It is 100% focused on local marketing and all the SEO features come under a single umbrella. It offers some notable features such as top-notch citation trackers, the ability to track industry-specific keywords, an easy-to-use interface, and an excellent support team.
Nevertheless, it cannot customize emails or monthly reports and takes longer to run manual reports.
BrightLocal offers various pricing models starting from $29 per month for small businesses, $49 per month for growing companies and $79 per month for large enterprises.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Whitespark
Whitespark builds full-fledged local SEO tools to help businesses with local search marketing. From building citations, earning reviews and tracking your search engine ranking, Whitespark helps win customers and uncover new opportunities.
Whitespark boasts several features like a review checker, Google My Business listings, reputation builder and link prospector to stack up against the local competition.
Whitespark, however, lacks automation, so you will still need to fill the citation form manually and the initial setup is a little intense.
You can get a free starter pack tool to explore this. According to your business calls, you will have to pay from $20 to $100 per month to upgrade plans.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Yext
Yext automates your local listings and location so that your customers will find you right when they try to reach you. With its real-time search behavior and conversion tracking, you can effortlessly gain new customer insights.
No matter which platform a customer uses, Yext lists your business across 150+ digital services globally. It helps customers to provide accurate and up-to-date answers to customer queries across the entire search ecosystem.
While its listings are firm, customers may encounter some hiccups such as slow response time and inconsistencies in delivery.
Yext offers a starter plan for $199 per year and goes further according to your specific business requirement.
Rating: 4 stars
Moz Local
Looking for the world’s most accurate as well as budget-friendly SEO software? Moz Local is here for you.
Moz Local maximizes your online visibility with its powerful SEO and reputation management tool while being easy on the pocket.
Its leading-edge functionalities are engaging customers across different social media platforms, actively managing location data and gaining valuable insights to increase visibility. Through deeper integrations with Google and Facebook, more accurate listings management and automation processes, you can see your SEO becoming more manageable.
Moz Local is challenging to understand for new users as some of its tools are complicated to use.
Moz Local offers an annual subscription price starting from $129 to $299 per year. You can also choose its 30-day free trial to test the usability of the SEO software before investing.
Rating: 4 stars
BuzzStream
BuzzStream facilitates link building and managing PR with influencers. If you are constantly working to build strategies like influencer marketing, drive word-of-mouth traffic and PR campaigns, BuzzStream is the right tool for you.
One of the cutting-edge features of BuzzStream is that it allows you to connect with local influencers and bloggers. BuzzStream also helps you manage link building and outreach from one user-friendly location, which is highly effective and time-saving.
BuzzStream has a few disadvantages. It can be a bit slow and has an outdated user interface. It also has no pre-built campaign and gives only 80% of NAP.
BuzzStream has four pricing plans starting from $24 per month for Starters, $99 per month for Group, $299 per month with Advanced Analytics Tool and $999 per month with Customized features.
Rating: 4 stars
To Rank Higher In Local Search, Use Local SEO Software
Getting ranked high in any search engine is a big deal in today’s traffic-driven marketplace. If you have a local business, local SEO will help your potential customer find you when they search online, and it means the opportunity for you to pull ahead of your competitors.
