Today, local SEO has become extremely important for businesses. In fact, local competition has become so fierce that it is important that a business is found during local search. So, as a local SEO agency, it is important that you have the best tools at your disposal to promote your clients and ensure they are found in local searches. The best tools for a local SEO agency are the ones that allow you work smarter and ensure you offer tangible results to your clients.

Local SEO is important not just for your clients, but even for your local SEO agency. It will allow prospect local businesses to find your agency when performing a local search. Nearly 88 per cent consumers have implicit faith in online reviews and trust when other people or businesses make recommendations. Nearly 18 per cent searches done through mobile phones result in a sale. These figures highlight the importance of local SEO, and hence as an SEO company, you need to give it your all for your clients as well as your own business.

Local SEO ensures you get found by prospects more easily compared to your competition. However, with local business being highly competitive, your agency needs all the tools it can lay its hands on to ensure your clients enjoy quantitative and qualitative benefits of using your services.

Remember, local SEO is for any business, regardless of whether it is operating at one location or multiple locations. It helps to generate leads for the business and then convert those leads into paying customers.

There are some tools that every local SEO agency should have. These tools will allow them to offer their customers the best local SEO results. So, without much ado, here are some of the best tools that your local SEO agency should have without fail.

You may be a local SEO expert, but you can still make your task easy by ensuring you have this tool. Local SEO Checklist is a systematic way to create a list of important things that you need to track when you optimize your clients’ websites.

The best part about this tool is that it keeps a track of your local SEO endeavors as you keep going. It tends to work even if the browser is closed. As long as your employees don’t clean the browser cache, it will keep track of your SEO efforts without a fail and let you know where you stand. This can be quite helpful when you are doing local SEO for multiple clients.

You may be already aware of schema. Well, this tool is similar to it. Google Structured Data Testing tool informs you about the content that is marked on your website. It also identifies errors in schema content. This tool can be extremely useful if you feel that the website has schema that will not be interpreted the right way by Google spiders. So, go ahead and take a closer look at it. You will find it extremely useful for your agency.

SEOProfiler is one of the most robust SEO tools you will find out there. It allows you to audit a client’s website, facilitates webpage optimizations, comes with a link disinfection tool, and helps you narrow down local keywords that will help your client’s website be found. It also lets you create customized PDF reports for your client.

This is a monthly subscription based tool and the cost is dependent on the features that you choose. So, if you are investing in this tool, it is best to select the features after careful evaluation.

• Collaborate in an effective manner, both at an internal level as well as with clients.
  
• Set milestones and reminders for every project through the use of automatic check-ins
  
• Facilitate chats in an informal way. These chats mostly revolve around clients
  
• Schedule and sync up third party calendars. This includes iCal,
• Google Calendar and Outlook
  
• Help users in linking documents and files on Google Drive
  
• Offer users permission when it comes to attaching files to to-do items. It also seeks approval from clients by sending updates
  

If there is one SEO tool that every SEO agency should have, it is TribeLocal. This web-based SEO tools allows you to claim listings on more than 100 local, niche and national directories. You can submit citations to business directories and thereafter track and update citations. It pinpoints errors in NAP so that you can correct them directly from the dashboard rather than logging on to individual sites. It also has an integrated analytics tool that allows you to get access to key metrics to find which local SEO strategies are working and which aren’t.

TribeLocal has integrated Google My Business so you can easily get your client to claim their listing and then use the tool to check how visitors find your client’s site and what actions they are taking after finding the site. TribeLocal also gives you an SEO expert who helps you, making your task as an agency much easier. It allows you to generate whitelabel reports, respond to online customer reviews and also acquire leads from your web properties for yourself and your clients.

You will be happy to learn that TribeLocal is affordably priced. You can get one citation for merely $3 while its monthly subscription pack starts from $39. There is no restriction on the features and every client enjoys comprehensive local SEO features to help their business flourish and thrive online.

As a part of local SEO, you will have to ensure that your clients’ websites get credible local backlinks. This is where BuzzStream helps you. It allows you to identify local influencers and build a relationship with them so that you can boost traffic to your clients’ websites and also ensure organic local traffic. It basically helps to spread the word about the local business and boost brand awareness at the local level.

You can use BuzzStream to promote client content and for digital PR. It is a paid service, with monthly subscription that you can opt for depending on whether you want a customized solution or use the available packages.

It goes without saying that schema is an integral part of SEO. Using Schema Creator, you can build schema markup with ease. As a result, it makes it easier for search engines to identify and index your clients’ website. When this happens, the chances of getting found by prospects are much higher as the webpages will turn up for relevant keywords when a person searches for it.

This is an invaluable tool for an SEO agency. Just create a business account to get access to the Keyword Planner. It will help you identify keywords that get maximum local traffic. You can even research long-tail keywords with the help of Keyword Planner. It lets you see the traffic every keyword gets and based on this, you can select the most appropriate keywords for your clients’ website and digital marketing campaigns.

Keyword Planner will minimize time and effort spent on research keywords. It allows you do your research based on your location, and the fact that it is free ensures that you enjoy its services without any worry.

While there are many tools, including TribeLocal, that allow you to perform an SEO audit on your clients’ websites, you should not hesitate to opt for a dedicated website analyzer, especially when it is free.

Upcity Website Analyzer analyzes every aspect of the webpage and gives it a score out of 100 that you can compare with the competition. Using this tool will allow you to determine the ranking of a page for a specific keyword, ranking of the keyword itself, the number of backlinks the webpage has, how accessible the webpage is, and much more. So, go ahead and give it a try and you will not regret it.

Plagiarized content is a major problem these days, and Google penalizes sites with unoriginal content. So, your clients’ website ranking will tank and this will adversely affect local SEO efforts that you put in.

To ensure that your clients’ website has completely original content, use CopyScape. It highlights duplicated content and even lets you know which site it was copied from. While there is a free basic option available, it is best to invest in the premium version of CopyScape that performs a comprehensive check.

So, when performing local SEO for your clients, you definitely want to keep an eye on the website loading time. You can do so with the help PageSpeed Insights. This tool is free and allows you to check the loading time of each webpage. It even offers suggestions on how you can reduce the loading time. So, this is a great way to ensure that visitors remain on your clients’ website for a longer duration.

Research shows that reducing the time it takes for a webpage to load from 15 seconds to two seconds has a profound effect on conversion rates. You can enhance conversion rate by 3 per cent for every second if you reduce the webpage loading time from 15 seconds to 7 seconds; by two per cent from 7 seconds to 5 seconds; and by one per cent if the webpage loading time is reduced to 2 seconds from 4 seconds.

Disavow Links Tool is offered by Google and Bing. This tool allows you remove links that are not genuine. Remember, Google slaps a penalty on sites that have poor links. Using Disavow Links Tool, you can do this quickly and ensure you use your time and effort for more productive SEO work.

You can even use this tool for any backlinks that are adversely affecting the SEO of your clients’ websites. By removing harmful links, you can ensure that the sites don’t fall afoul of Google’s Penguin algorithm.

However, if you are looking for a review funnel functionality, you can opt for the paid version of Grade.us. This way, you will be able to send gentle and unobtrusive reminders to customers to review the client.

As a part of local SEO, you may already be aware that genuine reviews from customers are extremely important. You can use the Grade.us tool to request customers to provide online reviews for each client. There is a free version available that can be used for this purpose. Then using TribeLocal, your client can respond to these reviews.

The local market is extremely competitive and your clients need an edge that you can get with the help of SimilarWeb. It helps you compare traffic between your client’s website and their competition and helps you see where the competitor is doing better than your client. This way, you will be able to tweak the local SEO strategies to ensure your client’s site performs better.

If you are a local SEO agency and you are not using Screaming Frog, you are not offering the best service to your clients. This tool allows you to perform quick site crawls. By crawling the website, you can check the main onsite elements and perform thorough onsite SEO. So, this is one tool your agency should have when managing the SEO for local businesses.

It cannot be emphasized enough that keeping a close watch on your clients’ competition is a must. You can find out the SEO strategies they are using to employ them on your clients’ websites and ensure they can enjoy similar results. This is what SEMrush allows you to do.

This tool monitors Google for more than 100 million keywords across 25 countries and presents you with comprehensive data that you can analyze and then use to improve local SEO of your clients.

You definitely need this tool for local SEO as Google ranks webpages as well as websites. XML Sitemaps ensures that Google can find and index individual webpages more easily by letting it know what each webpage URL contains. It is easy to use XML Sitemaps; just enter the webpage URL and certain other parameters to create the sitemap for each page.

When you do onsite local SEO for a client’s website, you never take into consideration how search engine spiders view the website. This is where Browseo helps you. It allows you to check the client’s site the way a search engine would see it. As a result, you can check the hierarchy you have given the elements and make the necessary changes, if needed.

A local SEO agency cannot function optimally without certain tools. And, the tools listed here are the best ones for any agency to have. They will help you perform optimally on behalf of your clients and you can even use the tools on your business website to ensure you can attract more prospects and paying customers.