TOP 5 TOOLS TO IMPROVE LOCAL SEO

Posted by Igloo on November 19th, 2020

This behavior best characterizes modern consumers in their innate desire for instant gratification. If you’re catering to a specific geographical location, you’re going to want to connect with searchers nearby before branching out. 

Why Local SEO Is Imperative to Business Success

56% of local businesses haven’t yet claimed their Google My Business listing, which means if you have, you’re already a few steps ahead of your competition. If you haven’t, you’re probably overlooking the advantages of a robust local SEO strategy. 

People want what they want when they want it, and local SEO takes a highly targeted approach towards satisfying your ideal buyer’s specific needs. Compared to organic results, local SEO is people-centric, allowing for a more customized marketing method. 

Nowadays, relevancy on search engines doesn’t just have to do with keywords and tags—it’s just much about geographic vicinity. In the last two years alone, the local search terms “nearby” and “near me” have nearly doubled.

Thus, if your business isn’t appearing on these results, you could be missing out on valuable local traffic and potentially high-performing leads.

Best Tools For Improving Local Search Rankings

If your local organic rankings aren’t where they should be, there are dozens of ways to improve them. Proximity, prominence, and relevance are three key players in your attempt to boost your listing. 

Fortunately, tasks that were once manual can now be automated with the right tools. Achieve your foundational local SEO checklist with these must-have tools.

Google My Business

Come across the term “search engine,” and you’re more than likely to think of Google. After all, users make over 2 trillion queries on it every year—that’s 68 million a minute. No matter your organization’s size, having a Google My Business listing will only work to your advantage.  

The majority of online searches demonstrate local intent. Thus, Google My Business can drive potential customers to your website every time they commit a related search. Not only does the platform do wonders for brand visibility and provide useful information to prospects—it allows you to respond to queries in real-time. 

From then on, the benefits you reap take on a domino effect. The more satisfied your customers, the likelier they will boost online appeal by leaving a positive review on your listing. As you build trust and credibility, traffic and sales aren’t long to follow.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

As an advertising platform, Google Adwords provides nearly instantaneous benefits. Unlike traditional SEO strategies, Adwords picks up the pace, allowing users to focus on multiple keywords at a time. 

Not to mention, you can switch campaigns on and off accordingly and achieve immediate visibility. Yes, the point of SEO is long-term success, but Google Adwords provides the initial push small and medium-sized businesses desperately need. 

Following your initial launch, Adwords works tirelessly to generate traffic, clicks, and conversions. This is thanks to a search ad’s ability to lift top-of-mind awareness by roughly 6.6%.

Bright Local

Business owners love a platform that centralizes every SEO tool you need. With Bright Local, all your bases are covered. A trusted citation partner with over 45,000 agencies, Bright Local is an obvious contender for local citation management. 

Two words to describe this lucrative local SEO system are fast and easy. Knowing where you stand amidst your competitors is as simple as the click of a button with Bright Local. 

Minutes-long audit processes reflect and monitor your listing across thousands of sites—but thousands mean a lot on your plate, doesn’t it? Not necessarily. Bright Local’s in-house experts can clean up and build citations for you and generate detailed reports for your review. 

Ahrefs

Most marketers will gripe about how the majority of local search tools are lacking. The good news is, Ahrefs consolidates planning, monitoring, and editing features for SEO and content marketing systems in one. 

Ahrefs can do a lot that other SEO tools can’t. Where most keyword mechanisms will limit searches to Google, Ahrefs accounts for nine other search engines, including Yahoo, YouTube, Bing, and Amazon. That means your YouTube account and Amazon storefront are likely to receive traction, too. 

If backlinks are a troublesome aspect of your particular business, Ahrefs is the best tool for monitoring their growth and decline over time. With its backlink checker, you can even spot malicious SEO attacks and improve your internal efforts on low-ranking pages. 

Moz

Moz isn’t just a tool for improving local SEO campaigns. The business in itself is a community that allows business owners to share insights and publishes educational videos weekly. 

Moz is famed for its ability to differentiate between global and local SEO, offering two distinct plans for both: Moz Pro and Moz Local. Moz Local functions hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google, requiring users to verify listings before proceeding. 

With Moz Local, optimizing your local business listing is intuitive and straightforward. Most of its features are automated, comprising its ability to impart information across hundreds of search engines and directories after filling out your data only once. 

The Moz system lets you know how you’re doing by sending notifications whenever someone reviews your business online. Don’t all SEO tools have an alert feature? Yes, but Moz makes it a point to provide you with the opportunity to respond to customers promptly. 

Conclusion

If you aren’t proactive in your local search efforts, you’re bound to lose potential customers to competitors. No matter the quality of your products and services, you won’t do any business if consumers don’t know you exist. 

SEO is no easy feat, but you can eliminate the majority of time-consuming tasks by automating them with the right digital tools. Local SEO is only one factor in the grand scheme of your brand reputation and organic reach—but it’s a crucial step towards achieving overall business success. 

Want to learn more? See the work we’ve done as an SEO agency in Dubai.