Top 10 Tools for a Local SEO Tune Up

The free local seo tools that I cover below can help you identify areas for improvement with on-page SEO, optimizing your Google+ business listing, finding inaccurate citations, finding the best citation sources, analyzing your link profile, verifying social markup, improving your site speed, and more.

While tools don’t make the SEO, they can definitely make the SEO a little more efficient. And saving precious time is something we can all rally around.

In the 10 tools below I hope to introduce you to at least one tool that you’re not currently leveraging. If I do introduce you to at least one new tool I’d appreciate it if you let me know in the comments below (If you’re feeling extra generous please share this post as well).

So, let’s get started David Letterman style and go from 10 to 1.

10. Schema Creator is a great tool developed by the team over at Raven Tools and it allows you to easily create schema markup for a number of the most popular schemas an SEO would use like marking up an organization, creating review schema, schema for an event or even for a person.

9. Google Alerts allows you to set up alerts that will notify you if your search query is found online. You should set this up for your business name and website url at a minimum. Google will notify you when they crawl content with your business name or website in it and bring it to your attention. If you get some good press this will let you know and you can follow up to see if there’s a possibility to have them link to you.

8. Moz Local identifies and analyzes how your business is listed across the web both with popular listing sites and major data aggregators. Citations, or mentions of your business name, address and phone number on other sites are extremely important for your local SEO. Moz Local also has a category search tool to help you identify the best categories to list your business in across popular sites. Moz Local also offers a paid service if you would like to submit your information to them and they will update it with the major data aggregators (InfoUSA, Neustar (the artist formally known as Localeze), Axciom and Factual).

7. GTmetrix checks your site for load time issues using both Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow to let you know where you have areas for improvement. Like your users bailing off your site like it was the Titanic wasn’t enough, Google announced back in 2010 that they were using page load time as an SEO ranking factor. Google wants to send it’s users to sites that have a good experience and if your site takes 4 seconds to load… well they’re not going to have a good experience. Chances are that they will bail off your site before the page even loads.

6.  Social Media Optimizer from Knowem.com allows you to put in a url and check to see if it is properly marked up for optimal social sharing on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and Twitter. The tool will see if the page is utilizing open graph markup, Twitter card and the code for Google interactive posts. Note: I wouldn’t pay too much attention to their Geo/Local or Standard SEO tabs. Google doesn’t use Geotags for geotargeting and they also don’t use the meta keywords tag.

5. 5MinuteSite.com allows you to quickly generate local keywords lists by inserting your base keywords and then setting up some parameters that will add the local modifiers like city, state and zip code based on the radius you set around a zip code.

4. Google Webmaster Tools – No Local SEO tools list would be complete without mentioning GWT. Get the goods directly from the source. Easily check crawl issues, 404 errors, if you’re still blocking your css, javascript and image files (which is standard in WordPress and most CMS’s) you can see that when you use “Crawl as Googlebot.” Google Webmaster Tools has too many features to list them all here.

3. Open Site Explorer is another great tool from Moz that you can utilize to do a link analysis. Your business can live or die by links so it is critical that you have a strategy in place for earning high quality links to your site. Conversely you also want to keep an eye on your links to make sure that you have a healthy link profile and that you don’t have overly optimized anchor text or links from bad neighborhoods. Moz recently rolled Open Site Explorer into the Moz set of tools to have a more cohesive dashboard (Good move Moz!). Also, check out the new feature in OSE called “Link Opportunities” which provides the ability to find content and link building opportunities.

2. BrightLocal’s Google+ Local Wizard allows you to get an analysis of your Google+ local business page alongside your competitors. The Google+ Local Wizard provides a detailed report letting you know which listings are verified, what categories they are using, how many images they’ve uploaded, how many reviews they have as well as the number of links each one has. In the matrix view you can see which citations you have alongside which citations your competitors have to help you identify high value citations that you should go secure.

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider – If you’re in the SEO industry, you’ve undoubtedly used screaming frog. It’s quick, easy to use and has tons of great functionality… and it’s FREE!

If you haven’t used screaming frog, it’s a great way to get an in-depth look at many important SEO factors on your site and filter through them quickly. You can automatically find duplicate title tags, images without alt text, title tags that may be too long, duplicate meta descriptions, broken links and a number of other on-site SEO issues you may want to address.

They’ve also made a number of updates recently that are extremely helpful. They added an overview section which highlights many of the potential issues for you so you don’t have to search for them. If you click on them they take you right to the view to see more detail.

With the myriad of Local SEO tools out there I couldn’t list them all, so if you think there’s one that deserves mention and it’s not on my list add it in the comments below to help out your fellow SEO brethren.

Bonus tools that you may also find extremely useful:
See which pages on any site are shared the most on social media – https://socialcrawlytics.com/
Rich Snippets Testing Tool – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Does your website qualify for the mobile friendly tag in Google search results? Find out here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Keyword suggestion tool – https://ubersuggest.org