The Best Local SEO Tools in 2023

What is Local SEO and How Does it Work

Local SEO is a way for search engines to offer users the most relevant results according to the user’s location data. This is very important for businesses because it narrows down the competition. You’re no longer competing with every law firm, just the local guys. What are you competing for? SEO is all about positioning. The better your SEO, the better chance that you will be shown higher on search results. That means you’re trying to outrank the local competition on search results. So how do you outrank the local competition? Start with building citations.

What Are Citations

A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address and phone number. Google uses these references to your website to help determine the online authority where you rank in search results. Why does Google use this to determine where you appear in searches? Because to Google, it’s logical that a business that’s mentioned a lot online is more important than one that’s never mentioned.

The Local SEO Ecosystem

To understand the ecosystem, you must be familiar with several terms.

• Data Aggregators: Businesses collect, update, and enrich business data and then sell to other companies, such as business directories.
• Business Data Feeds: When aggregators collect business data, it is compiled in a structured manner and made more easily accessible.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so this infographic from Whitespark is worth more than 10,000 words.

Whitespark Local SEO Ecosystem

This infographic aims to help comprehend how the local SEO ecosystem is a constantly changing series of interdependent relationships of data aggregators such as Infogroup, Factual, Acxiom and Localeze, and local search sites such as Google, Yahoo, Yelp, and City Search.

Building Citations

A citation is any online mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number. These can occur on local business directories, apps, and social platforms.

The best strategy to build them is to make sure your current citations are correct and formatted the way they are. Make sure your NAP is 100% consistent before moving on.

From here, you can use tools to help you get to the top without trying to reinvent the wheel.

Best Citation Management Software

Moz Local

Moz Local is a publishing tool that pushes US and Canadian business NAP to their partner sites and directories. The partners of Moz Local will then publish those details across their directories.

Whitespark

Whitespark helps you get more customers from Google by improving your search ranking. Key features include Local Citation Finder, Reputation Builder, and Local Rank Tracker to help you quickly find critical citations, increase customer feedback, and accurately track your rankings on Google and Bing in any city.

BrightLocal

Bright Local is an integrated SEO and local citation platform with tools aimed to help increase the visibility of your business on the web and attract more local customers. The platform is used by professional digital marketers, freelancers, and companies worldwide.

SEM Rush Listing Management

SEM Rush was an all-in-one marketing suite that integrated Yext technology into a valuable platform to create a new Listing Management Tool. The tool uses the Yext Knowledge Engine and aims at reducing marketers’ time spent on administrative work.

Tribe Local

Tribe Local is a local marketing software that provides listing management, review management, rank tracking, and reporting services. It has a dashboard to access those functions to manage the business’ local online presence.

Yext

Yext is another local citation service that uses data management tools to keep track of your business location-related information on multiple directories.

Conclusion

Looking for the best local SEO software or SEO citation tool can be overwhelming. All of the software mentioned above has tons of online information and digital marketing agencies with free resources for use. Understanding local SEO is the first step to improving your current efforts. This blog will help you in your journey.