Tools for Local Search Engine OptimizationIt’s no secret that SEO’s absolutely love tools – and for very good reasons. They save us an amazing amount of time gathering and organizing the information we want to discover about competitors and sets of competitors. They also enable us to assign tool related tasks to semi skilled assistants, freeing us up for analysis, planning and execution.

One of the toughest aspects of doing Local Search Optimization has been a lack of such tools. Without automation, endless hours are spent on data collection. In an effort to make our own work more efficient, Mike Belasco and I developed a competitive analysis tool for Local SEO.

The tool collects and delivers information about the local business listings that rank in the Google Local Pack for a geographically modified keyword or set of keywords. You’ll discover the categories, citation sites and review sites of those high rankers, along with information on whether the listings have been claimed in Google Places and some other tasty tidbits that students of the Google Local Search algorithm will feast on.

As is to be expected, our brief period of beta testing has uncovered quite a few unexpected bugs that we’re working to correct. But even though it’s far from perfect, we think you’ll still find it highly useful at this stage in its development. Our goal is to create a complete set of tools for Local SEO and we already have a few others in the works.

I’ll be writing more about how to conduct effective competitive analysis for Local Search, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I invite you to help us test our new Local Search Tool Kit and let us know what you think!