Local search engine optimization is critical for any business looking to expand their customer base. From presence on mobile apps to showing up when a user is at home doing product research, local search generates web traffic, and in turn, traffic generates customers. To help businesses succeed in easily and efficiently implement local SEO, we’ve identified the most relevant tools for local SEO that will help you get the job done – or at least get it started:

The Top 50 Tools for Local SEO

1) Whitespark

“Get noticed and let Whitespark do the work for you. We help local businesses increase their visibility and make it easy for clients and search engines to find you online.”

A great tool to find local citations of your business on the web. It does require a quick sign up to create a free account, which allows up to three searches per day.

2) BrightLocal.com

“The easy way to track your local & organic search rankings in Google, Yahoo & bing”

BrightLocal is a local seach rank checker. It will track key search terms across localized search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing — and show you how your keywords are performing in Google blended searches. You can get a 30-day free trial.

3) GeoRanker

“The future of SERP tracking is all about local.”

GeoRanker uses IP based technology to show you where you rank for specific search terms in over 2,000 cities worldwide. This is valuable information if you have multiple locations, and are trying to target specific markets for your products and/or services.

4) UpCity Free Website Analyzer

UpCity provides clean, easy to understand report cards for search terms in Google. This free tool allows you to enter your most important keyword and location, then it displays a visual representation of your score.

5) Facebook Graph Search

Graph Search brings opportunities to have your business discovered. Add a Facebook page for your business, and use it to help prospects find you through social media.

6) 5minutesite.com

5minutesite.com provides a local PPC AdWords and keyword lost creator. It’s a free tool that generates targeted keyword lists specifically for business owners looking for local web traffic.

7) Vivial

“Did you know that 60% of directories have errors in them?”

Vivial allows you to enter your website’s URL and then it reports which local business directories and search engines you appear in. You can see your published addresses in one place, making sure visitors can easily find you.

8) GetListed.org

“Manage your online business listings with a single click.”

GetListed.org — now owned by SEOmoz — checks the major local search directories to verify that you’re listed. It makes it easy to fix any issues there may be and claim listings of your business that you haven’t yet.

9) Google Mobile: Test Your Site

“Make Your Website Work Across Multiple Devices”

This site tester may not seem like a local search engine tool, but in the end, if a potential customer is using a mobile device to look for stores near them, your website needs to be prepared to deal with mobile browsers.

10) Local Citation Finder

“Discover where to list your business for better local search rankings.”

This is a good platform, especially for businesses that don’t have a robust web presence. It gives SEO professionals the opportunity to identify quality citations that are being missed. With a free version available, users can choose from a variety of options that best suit their needs.

11) Google Places Category Tool

If you’re looking to expand categories for your local SEO, this is a great tool that helps categorize your SEO keywords into different sections. It’s a basic tool, but it’s free!

12) Wordstream

“Get thousands of keyword suggestions from a constantly updated database.”

The Wordstream Free Keyword Tool offers thousands of keyword ideas from a huge database of a trillion unique searches to help you lock up the local SERPs.

13) Keyword Eye Basic

“Keywords. Visualized. Simplified.”

Keyword Eye Basic is a visual keyword suggestion tool, very useful for you local SEO brainstorming sessions.

14) Keyword Tool

Even though this tool is specifically for researching video, the YouTube Keyword Tool is great for keyword research for all kinds of content.

15) Übersuggest

Übersuggest uses the “Suggest” data from Google and other search engines to give you an idea of other keywords that your target audience is searching for. It’s an awesome tool for developing long-tail phrases.

16) Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

The Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool outputs anchor text diversity. Words or phrases that are potentially over-optimized are highlighted for manual review.

17) Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

Convert Word Docs to HTML with this tool. Documents created in Microsoft Word, Writer, and other word processing software are transformed to a web-friendly format.

18)  Copyscape

Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker. The software lets you enter a URL to detect duplicate content and to verify the originality of your content.

19) Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a PC based spidering software that checks websites for broken links. It performs validation of text links, frames, images, local image maps, and backgrounds.

20) Robots.txt Generator

Robots.txt Generator is a utility that makes the creation of robots.txt files easy.

21) Robots.txt Checker

Robots.txt Checker is a “validator” that will analyze the syntax of a robots.txt file to verify the format is correct.

22) URI Valet

Use the URI Valet check server headers. Use it to view the total number of http requests, time to download, object details, document internal links, and external links along with verifying server headers for each one.

23) Title and Meta Description Optimization Tool

This tool gives insight as to what keywords your top ranking competitors are using in their title tags and meta descriptions. It’s one of the best of its kind.

24) Varvy Image SEO Tool

Input a URL and this tool checks the image name, alt attribute, and dimensions are optimized. Alerts are given if a potential problem is discovered.

25) Schema Creator

The Schema Creator tool is the easiest way to get started creating HTML with schema.org microdata.

26) Google Snippet Optimizer

The snippet that appears in Google’s search results is usually taken from meta tags. The Google Snippet Preview tool helps visualize and optimize what is displayed to those searching for your keywords.

27) Structured Data Testing Tool

The Structured Data Testing Tool verifies Schema.org or any other structured data type markup.

28) XML Sitemap Generators

XML Sitemap Generators create “web-type” XML sitemaps and URL-list files – other formats are supported too.

29) XML Sitemap Inspector

XML Sitemap Inspector validates your sitemap, repairs errors, and pings all search engines.

30) Pingdom Website Speed Tester

This tests the load time of a page, analyzes it, and reports bottlenecks to you – if there is any.

31) Telerik Fiddler

Fiddler is a free web debugger which logs all http(s) traffic between your computer and the internet.

32) Microsoft SEO Toolkit

The SEO Toolkit with its detailed analysis and search engine-friendly suggestions helps improve the relevance of your website in search results right away.

33) Review Handout Generator

This tool from Whitespark enables you to enter your business data and create a PDF handout that can be given to customers at the time of service, with the goal of reviewing you online.

34) Offline Conversion Tracker

Empower your phone staff to collect “how did you hear about us?” data and enter it into this form during phone calls. The tool fires the data over to Google Analytics and uses UTM tracking parameters so that the data is tracked in your analytics reports as well.

35) USPS ZIP Code Tool

Inconsistencies in address data can cause problems in your Google rankings. Thanks to this tool, you can be totally sure that you’re publishing the correct, official zip code for your business.

36) OSHA Standard Industrial Category Tool

Especially helpful when listing your business at ExpressUpdate, this tool lets you enter keywords to determine under which official category your business falls. If you don’t know your Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) number, which must be entered into the tool along with your keyword, you can find a list of numbers here too.

37) Census.gov Tools

Need to know more about the population and economics of a client’s city in the US? You can find a ton of useful statistical information in the most recent census data that will help you fine tune your campaigns.

38)  Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking helps you search both generic and local keywords for your site. It accumulates data from Google Adwords, Google Webmaster API, Google Suggest, Word Tracker, Yahoo API, and more.

39) SEO Audit Tool

Scan any landing page or website URL to see how optimized it is for your targeted key phrase.

40) Google Alerts

As a local business, you are bound to receive online reviews and feedback from your customers. To get alerts from every brand mention that occurs on these review sites, you can set up a Google Alert like this “keyword” site:xyz.com.

41) Rank Tracker

With this rank tracking tool, you can track your local keywords SERP rankings in 326 search engines, store historical data of your SERP rankings, create progress graphs and get keyword suggestions.

42) Get Five Stars

This tool is useful for local e-commerce and people-oriented businesses that will profit from positive online reviews. This tool gives you a system where you can ask your customer for feedback, monitor the reviews, and embed them as testimonials on your site with Google-friendly search snippets.

43) Google’s Gadgets Driving Directions

Google Gadgets provide this free store locator that gives driving directions to your local business from the user’s location. Although this tool does not directly affect your local SEO, it may help in bringing more customers to your physical store who will then leave back a positive online review on a third-party site, hence enhancing your local SEO.

44) Yext

As well as being a business citation finder tool, this tool also offers to list your sites on various other business listing sites where your business isn’t present. The tool also provides review monitoring and offers local search analytics to track your business’s local search performance.

45) Local SEO Checklist

The Local SEO Checklist gives you a simple step-by-step checklist that you can use to better track your optimization efforts. The most interesting thing about this tool is that it tracks your progress as you go, even if you close your browser and re-open it – as long as you don’t clear your browser cache.

46) Google Structured Data Inspector

The Google Structured Data Testing Tool tells you what content on your website is marked, and reports errors that it may find in the way your schema-ed content is marked up. This is especially useful if you’ve done some work in the past, or parts of your website have schema that you’re not sure is being read and interpreted properly.

47) Synup Listings Scan

The Synup software scans your business listing on over 100 local directories, as well as different review sites, to show you how you’re present. You can drill down into each listing to see exactly how you appear on each website.

48)  Free Review Monitoring

FreeReviewMonitoring.com monitors your reviews on all the major review sites for free on a daily basis. It also sends out an email to you each day with new reviews as they are crawled.

49)  Grade.us

Grade.us creates a simple review page that you can use to request reviews from your clients. Getting more reviews is an integral part of local SEO and this tool comes in very handy for that. Unfortunately, the free version of Grade.us doesn’t include their review funnel functionality.

50) Google AdWords Keywords Planner

Keyword Planner is like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical statistics, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by putting several lists of keywords together. A free AdWords tool, Keyword Planner can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns.

With these 50 tools for local SEO, you should be able to easily and efficiently improve your results. Try out a couple of tools at a time and you’ll build up your results quickly.

Related Reading:

• The 50 best SEO tools
• 7 ways to earn links to your site
• How to promote your links in forums
• The top conversion tracking tools for marketers

This blog post is about:

• Tools for local SEO
• Local SEO resources
• Local SEO marketing
• Top tools for local SEO