What a lot can change in just a few years! When I wrote the original version of this post in January 2014, the local SEO industry didn’t have quite the wealth of paid tools that now exists, and many of the freebies on my previous list have been sunsetted. Definitely time for a complete refresh of the most useful free tools, widgets, and resources I know of to make marketing local businesses easier and better.

While all of the tools below are free, note that some will require you to sign up for access. Others are limited, no-cost, or trial versions that let you get a good sense of what they provide, enabling you to consider whether it might be worth it to buy into paid access. One thing you may notice: my new list of local SEO tools offers increased support for organic SEO tasks, reflective of our industry’s growing understanding of how closely linked organic and local SEO have become.

Now, let’s open this toolkit and get 2018 off to a great start!

For Research
US Census Bureau Tool Set

Looking to better understand a target community for marketing purposes? You’ll find 20+ useful resources from the US Census Bureau, including population statistics, economic data, mapping and geocoding widgets, income and language information, and much more.

Client Onboarding Questionnaire & Phone Script

Onboarding a new client? Reduce repetitious follow-ups by asking all of the right questions the first time around with this thorough questionnaire and easy-to-follow phone call script from Moz. Includes helpful tips for why you are asking each question. As local SEO veterans will tell you, a missed question can lead to unhappy (and costly) surprises down the marketing road. Be sure you have the total picture of an incoming client in clear view before you begin strategizing.

Location Information Spreadsheet

Vital when marketing multi-location businesses, this free Moz spreadsheet will ensure that you’ve got all the info at your fingertips about each locale of a company.

*Pro tip: When working with large enterprises, be certain that the data you’re inputting in this spreadsheet has been approved by all relevant departments. It’s really no fun to find out six months into a marketing campaign that there’s internal disagreement about company NAP or other features.

Local Competitive Audit Spreadsheet

Now we’re really getting down to brass tacks. When you need to look for answers to the perennial client question, “Why is that guy outranking me?”, this free Moz spreadsheet will help you document key competitive data. The end result of filling out the sheet will be two columns of stats you can compare and contrast in your quest to discover competitors’ ranking strengths and weaknesses. Need more guidance? Read my blog post in which I put this audit spreadsheet into action for two San Francisco Bay Area Chinese restaurants.

Manual GeoLocation Chrome Extension

Watch Darren Shaw demo using this tool to show how a local pack changes when a user virtually crosses a street and you’ll quickly understand how useful this Chrome extension will be in approximating the impacts of user-to-business proximity. Works well on desktop devices.

Our industry still hasn’t fully recovered from Google removing the Local Search filter from its engine in 2015, and I still live in hope that they will bring it back one day, but in the meantime, this extension gives us a good sense of how searcher location affects search results. In fact, it may even be a superior solution.

The MozBar SEO Toolbar

Local businesses in competitive markets must master traditional SEO, and the free MozBar provides a wonderful introduction to the metrics you need to look at in analyzing the organic strengths and weaknesses of clients and competitors. On-page elements, link metrics, markup, HTTP status, optimization opportunities – get the data you need at a glance with the MozBar.

Google Advanced Search Operators

Not a tool, per se, but the best tutorial I have ever seen on using Google advanced search operators to deepen your research. Dr. Pete breaks this down into 67 steps that will enable you to use these search refinements for content and title research, checking for plagiarism, technical SEO audits, and competitive intelligence. Be totally wizardly and impress your clients and teammates, simply by knowing how to format searches in smart ways.

Google Search Console

Apologies if it already seems like a no-brainer to you that you should be signed up for Google’s console that gives you analytics, alerts you to serious errors, and so much more, but local SEO is just now crossing the threshold of understanding how deeply connected it is to organic search. When playing in Google’s backyard, GSC is a must-have for businesses of every type.

BrightLocal’s Search Results Checker

This popular tool does an excellent job of replicating local search results at a city or zip code level. In some cases, it’s best to search by city (for example, when there are multiple towns covered by a single zip code), but other times, it’s better search by zip code (as in the case of a large city with multiple zip codes). The tool doesn’t have the capability to recreate user-level results, so always remember that the proximity of a given user to a business may create quite different results than what you’ll see searching at a city or zip code level. I consider this a great tool to suss out the lay of the land in a community, identifying top competitors.

Offline Conversion Tracker Form

Give this handy Whitespark form to anyone who answers your phone so that they can document the answer to the important question, “How did you hear about us?” Submitted information is saved to Whitespark’s database and tracked in Google Analytics for your future reference and analysis. For local businesses, knowledge of offline factors can be priceless. This form provides a simple point of entry into amassing real-world data.

For Content
Answer the Public

One of the best-loved keyword research tools in the digital marketing world, Answer the Public lets you enter a keyword phrase and generate a large number of questions/topics related to your search. One of the most awesome facets of this tool is that it has a.CSV download feature – perfect for instantly generating large lists of keywords that you can input into something like Moz Keyword Explorer to begin the sorting process that turns up the most powerful keywords for your content dev and on-page optimization.

Buzzsumo

Another great content inspiration tool, Buzzsumo shows you lets you enter a keyword, topic or domain name, and then shows you which pieces are getting the most social shares. For example, a search for wholefoodsmarket.com shows that a highly shared piece of content at the time of my search is about an asparagus and broccoli soup. You can also sort by content type (articles, videos, infographics, etc.). Use of Buzzsumo can help you generate topics that might be popular if covered on your website.

OSHA Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) System Search

Another interesting resource for brainstorming a wide pool of potential keywords for content dev consideration, OSHA’s SIC search returns big, comprehensive lists. Just look up your industry’s SIC code, and then enter it along with a keyword/category to get your list.

USPS Look Up a ZIP Code Widget

Working with service area businesses (SABs)? Note the second tab in the menu of this widget: Cities by zip code. When you know the zip code of a business you’re marketing you can enter it into this simple tool to get a list of every city in that zip. Now, let’s not take a wrong step here: don’t publish large blocks of zips or city names on any website, but do use this widget to be sure you know of all the communities for which an SAB might strategize content, link building, brand building, real-world relationship building, social media marketing, and PPC.

Schema/JSON-LD Generators

Rather than list a single tool here, I’m going to take the advice of my friend, schema expert David Deering, who has taught me that no one tool is perfect. In David’s opinion, there isn’t currently a schema/JSON-LD generator that does it all, which is why he continues to build this type of markup manually. That being said, if you’re new to Schema, these generators will get you started:

Every time Google comes up with some amazing yet surprising updates that impact your SEO in some or other manner. Google recently announced that page speed will be a ranking sign for mobile search starting in July. This is something mainly SEO pros have suspected for quite some time, but we’re glad it is now confirmed as Google has also started to roll out the mobile index, which directly puts mobile first.

Page speed is extremely significant for user experience. Pages that take a long time to load be likely to have higher bounce rates. Slow-loading pages can also unconstructively impact your conversion rates because end users won’t uncomplainingly wait for pages to load.

But Why Else Should You Care?

Now the question here arises is that why Google launched the mobile index and embraced a mobile-first move towards by dedicating a major index for mobile, I think page speed could become more of a mid-level signal than a trivial signal like HTTPs.

If you provide users with a high-quality content and user experience and they can discover what they are looking for – and the happy experience meets their intention across all devices and platforms and provides worth – why not?

Here are some things that you can do to get prepared

You need to get ready for the mobile index by making certain that you are providing the correct content experience and have high-quality content that satisfies consumer intention.

Make certain your pages load as speedily as likely, preferably within one to two seconds. It’s your sole responsibility to check the speed of your page and make a fast load time to find a solution to their problem or find something they are searching for. In your competition, there are certainly other sites that are other sites that are trying to get the click and so your site must load as rapidly as possible to remain reasonable.

In addition to this to make your website, mobile speed high is important as it will impact your SEO and rankings. While AMP isn’t a ranking factor right at the present, it could be in the prospect. There are other conducts to speed up your website if you do not want to use AMP. However, you should believe using AMP because these pages load tremendously fast – and you could potentially increase your conversions and see enhanced search engine rankings once AMP becomes a rank signal.

Wrap up section

Another situation could be almost certainly taking some page that is ranking well in the top rankings and stripping the page of all except some very light elements such as a small number of images and content – no CSS styling, no needless fancy JavaScript, etc.

With the launch of this mobile update and indexing Google now stating that speed will be an aspect of mobile, it is time to start taking this sincerely.

Applying all these factors will surely help improve your user experience, boost conversions, keep users on your site longer, and drive more organic traffic.

In the game of search engine optimization, there are winners and losers. The difference between them is their rankings. Planning your strategy is one factor; monitoring your success on search engines is another. In 2018, the game has changed yet again.

Some entrepreneurs choose to consult a digital marketing firm for their SEO strategies. However if you’re prepping yourself to see how well your site is doing on search engines, you can familiarize yourself with the best tools for SEO.

Mind you, some tools are paid and some are free. Nonetheless, these tools are the best of the best and up-to-date, so it’s most likely worth investing in.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics provides analytics for SEO, backlinks, and social media. They have a set of collected data per website, giving you insights and trends in backlinks, SEO visibility, and the like.

They also provide a weekly ranking for keywords, which is good for measuring which keywords your website should rank for. Searchmetrics gives insights on overall search trends.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a free toolset that helps you understand what’s happening on your website. It also explains the essentials of Google search, and helps you comprehend the way Google sees your site.

One of its features allows you to browse an article the way Google perceives it. This allows you to step up your SEO game especially if your campaign is doing poorly. The data you collect from this feature can help you adjust the webpage for better results.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a free tool for keyword research. The website offers many toolkits including an SEO toolkit. One of its top features allows you to plug in different web pages to see how they’re ranking for which keywords, how that page ranks for a certain keyword, particular keywords’ monthly search volume, and the like.

Additionally, SEMrush also lets you research appropriate keywords, compare your page’s performance to your competitors’, analyze backlinks from other websites to yours, and play on similar on-page SEO opportunities.

UpCity SEO Report Card

This tool allows you to analyze how your website ranks against your opponents. Like an actual report card, SEO Report Card gives you an assessment of your rank, link building, on-site analysis (how well you fused your keywords throughout your site), website accessibility (your site’s load time and ease of accessibility for crawlers), trust metrics, and current indexing (the number of your site pages that have been indexed).

This tool is free, and all you have to provide is some contact information like your name, email address, phone number, and website.

Seobility

Seobility shows you how well or badly your website’s SEO optimization is performing. They have various features like SEO check (checking your website and giving you tips for better SEO), keyword check (showing you how your page is optimized for your keywords), SEO compare (comparing your page and another for the same keyword), and ranking check (checking your page’s rank for any keyword).

Seobility has automated website crawling that checks your website while following all backlinks, monitors your emails, and detects errors in content and the structure of your website.