Checking where you rank in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local is important for any business that serves a local area or requires a local presence. Since Google started blending results (and the dreaded ongoing personalization of the SERPs) it has become more difficult to accurately work out where you rank month on month.
Although rankings should not be how you judge the success of a Local SEO campaign they are an important campaign barometer - and having some sort of ranking details are important. Although tools like Advance Web Ranking have the ability to track your local results their pricing can be a little bit high for a lot of businesses that require this kind of information.
This is where BrightLocal enter the fold. They have been around for well over a year now and provide the best (IMHO) online tool for checking your local search results. Not only does the tool do an awesome job at a very reasonable price there are lots of other goodies that can help you dominate you local search vertical.
So how can BrightLocal help your business?
Checking Local Rankings
There may be a day where rankings are not reported on, but for now they are still incredibly important for businesses and for SEOs to gauge visibility. The local rank checker put together by the guys at BrightLocal is by far the best tool that I have seen for tracking the progress of your Local SEO campaign. not only does it track your ranking in Google Places but in Yahoo and Bing as well:
You can run a single one off report or you can schedule a report to run each month for ongoing projects.
Not only do the results look pretty (!) but they are full of the kind of information that you need to make decisions moving forward with your campaign.
Check Your Local SEO Health
If you need to check on the current health of your Local SEO then BrightLocal can help out with this as well. For the cost of a few dollars you can run a Local SEO report that will look at a number of factors (on page and off) to determine the health of your Local SEO. The report gives you an overall summary and looks at:
- Off Site SEO
- Current Rankings
- On Site SEO
- Directory Listings
- Business Address and Phone Number Consistency
- Your Google Places and Competitors
As you can see below there is wealth of information that is pulled for you (that would take hours if not days in the real world) that will help you optimise both on site and off site factors. The details of the report are too extensive to go into here so I suggest you run one for yourself! Highlights include:
An easy to understand summary (with smiley faces):
Details of where your business is listed and whether you have optimised each of these listings:
Check your Google Places and how they stack up against your closest competitors:
Help You Check Current Citations And Get New Ones
If that isn't enough BrightLocal have a citation tracker (if you are new to Local SEO a citation is a mention of your business and its details on a trusted third party site - more quality citations help you rank higher in Google Places). This tool will scour the Internet to find out which citations your business has and which ones you should get to help you rank higher in local search.
The citation tracker is a great way to keep tabs on all your citations that you have worked on, are working on or are going to work on. All of it is presented beautifully and can be downloaded to CSV if that is your bag!
See your active citations:
See what citations you need to be getting in order to give you a competitive advantage:
If your business requires any kind of Local SEO then BrightLocal is becoming a one stop shop to help you dominate the local search results across the major search engines. The amount of time that it saves is huge - and that has to be a bonus for any busy business!
Key Local Search Resources:
About the Author: Wayne Barker
