Best tools for checking competitors citations.
-
I am using whitespark and brightlocal to run citation checks for my clients. I was curious if there was a good tool to compare competitor citations + other local metrics easily without paying per report.
-
Hello
Whitespark's paid citation tool continues to be the most widely-cited in the Local SEO industry. However, have you tried SEOverflow's Local Search Toolkit?
http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/
I know it was free when it was released. Not sure if it remains so. Might be worth checking out!
Miriam
-
Thats right, totally forgot about that whiteboard! Thakns much.
-
I'm not sure if there is a good, free tool out there, but Rand covered this in a Whiteboard Friday a few months ago. Check out the attached video. At item #4, he discusses using some search operators to get a basic idea of your competitors' citations. This can be done by searching for the competitor's name, address and excluding the results for their own site. Like this:
competitor "1234 competitor ave" -site:competitor.com
The results are sometimes a little messy but its a great place to start. Hope this helps!
[Local SEO Checklist for New Sites](Local SEO Checklist for New Sites)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Video Editing tools
Can anyone list me the best video editing tools. I am currently using camtasia studio but the quality is poor. Any tutorials and list of equipments to create a good quality video,Any help is appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | sobanadevi2 -
NAP: Best practices on your website?
My store currently has 2 location and will soon have 3. I was wondering what the best practice for listing your address information on a website. I currently have all 3 listings on one page, but would like to have a separate page for each location (to include managers and specific location info). My question is what is the best practice for listing locations on a website (for SEO)? Should I have a landing page with all 3 and their NAP info then have a link to the specific page with the same NAP info. Would having that info twice be a negative?
Image & Video Optimization | | nat88han0 -
Does capitalization consistency matter in Local Citations?
In my research I have found multiple citations that were both lowercase and uppercase. Does this inconsistency effect ranking?
Image & Video Optimization | | jonnyholt0 -
Local SEO Best Practice
Hi We currently have 6 showrooms in a geographical area (Scotland,UK) and each showroom covers a specific region within the country encompassing towns and cities. So for example showroom A based in Edinburgh covers a customer area of Edinburgh, Fife, St Andrews while showroom B located in Glasgow covers Glasgow, Livingston etc In google places I have drawn the geographical area on the map that each showroom covers making sure that they do not overlap At present some of which are ranking well in local but one is stating that 'google does not support this location' and after following previous advice on the forum this is still the case. Would I be better setting up another google account for this showroom and submit it again into Google Places or would it be better going into Google+ business pages? or are they the same thing? Finally is it worth using the following in Google Places? KML File and Geo Sitemap generation (these files are needed for Google) Address output in Schema.org format
Image & Video Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Does anyone have experience with ecinity.com as a vehicle for populating local search directories? If yes, how would you rank it as a competitor to Localeze and UBL?
I've been approached by the company to use their tool. It has functionality beyond just populating local data sources which I'm not concerned with. I just want to know how it ranks in terms of local directory coverage. They claim 85% of the local directories will be populated.
Image & Video Optimization | | DonnaDuncan0 -
What are the best practices for Google Places for a manufacturer?
A manufacturing client has distributors around the world. Can I add these distributors to my client's Google Places account through the bulk upload feature? Is there a better way to ensure that people searching in the company's various territories see a Google Places entry for the appropriate distributor?
Image & Video Optimization | | joshfialkoff-778630 -
Does the location of a citation on a page have any relivance?
We have been working on local SEO quite a lot for our small business, trying to understand why we are consistantly outranked by our competators. I understand there are many factors at play here. I realize that DA & PA, Places page optimization, and on page optimization also play a role, but for the purpose of this question i would like to focus on just one factor: citations. From your experiance with local SEO do you find that a citation that is located closer to the top of the page holds more weight than a citation buried further down a page? Here is an example:
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/Storage-Self+Service/Toronto+ON/ in this case the people paying for the priority positions on that page are right at the top of the page, rather than buried 5 pages into the results. in fact they are right at the top of each page of the results, so over and over again they are above the free listings. I have heard that google considers the value of a link based on its position on the page. So would it be safe to assume that google also considers the value of a citation based on its position on the page? Thank you for your time,
Storwell0 -
Does position in local directories effect google detecting citations?
There are a lot of local directories that i have seen google pull citations from. Quite often i see people putting listings in these directories prefixed by several "A"s, so that they will appear on the first page of the list. Just how deep does google crawl through the pages of these lists? will google actually crawl through all the pages? Some of these directories offer paid listings that appear at the top of the directory. We have been considering purchasing some of these paid positions, so that google would be more likely to pickup our citations. In one case i have noticed a directory: shopincities.com do something that spiked my interest. Basically, if you start clicking through the different pages of a category, the site will block you after 3 or 4 pages in. It serves you an error saying that you are not human. In my mind this is to prevent google from fully crawling their whole list, so that the people who pay for the top positions are picked up, and the people who don't pay, even though their profiles are listed there, never get crawled by google. So would you pay for position on these directories? here are some examples: http://www.shopincities.com
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
http://www.411.ca
http://www.goldbook.com
http://www.n49.ca
http://torontodirect.com
http://www.yellowpages.com Or would you just throw a whole bunch of A's infront of your business name so you appear on the first page of listings? Or do you belive it doesn't matter how deep you are in the listings, and with enough time google will find it regardless and credit it as a citation?0
