The Enterprise Local SEO Toolkit

Did you know that 50% of customers who do a local search on their mobile phone visit a store within 24 hours? Optimizing for these types of searches, “local SEO”, ensures that your store is the one they are visiting.

Since success in the local search results comes down to how your locations perform in their hyperlocal markets, it is important to have a solid local SEO strategy in place. However, if you’re marketing for big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, it can be challenging to develop a strategy that ensures each one of your locations is being fully optimized.

Here are the essential tools every enterprise needs in their local SEO toolkit:

1.  Review Monitoring Tools

As customers search, one of the first things they look towards in their decision-making process are reviews. 93% of consumers read online reviews to decide if a business is good or not. ‘

It is essential for businesses to keep an eye on every review that is coming in from around the web. However, this can present a challenge For enterprise brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, trying to keep track of the thousands of reviews they receive every month.

Review monitoring tools allow big brands to pull in all of their reviews for multiple locations, from a variety of review sites into one single location. This saves brands from the manual effort of checking multiple review sites, for every location, every day – a daunting and inefficient task.

This is a free tool and such, comes with some limitations. This tool allows you to track all of your reviews on Google and Yelp for up to 3 locations. They will even send email notifications when new reviews come in.

Tracking multiple locations side-by-side helps to compare and contrast your stores and determine why one has been more successful than the others. In addition, email alerts help you to stay on top of your reputation and respond to any potential issues as they arise.

Built with enterprises in mind, Chatmeter’s review monitoring solution allows large brands to track all of their reviews, for every location across a vast network of review providers. This tool leaves brands fully equipped to easily monitor all of their reviews no matter how many locations they have.

Of course, we are a little biased to which tool you should choose, but there are a handful of great review monitoring tools out there. When looking for the right one to add to your toolkit, be sure to look for important features like real-time monitoring and alerts, partnerships with major providers like Yelp, and competitor monitoring.

2.  Sentiment Analysis

Not only are reviews important for building your online reputation and influencing customers, but they help brands to gain some valuable insights as well.

A sentiment analysis tool is critical for extracting all of the valuable customer feedback that lay hidden in each of your reviews. Sentiment analysis turns an endless library of reviews into actionable insights by identifying key topics within each review and assigning it a “positive”, “negative” or “neutral” sentiment score.

This helps businesses to identify trends around some of the topics that are most important to them. For example, a burger chain can determine the sentiment around their “cheeseburger” to identify if their customers are satisfied with that product and how they can make it better.

3.  Listings Management

44% of customers have felt that outdated or inaccurate business listings have ruined their shopping experiences, dissuading them from making a purchase. Having control over one’s store location data is arguably one of the most influential things a business can do in order to improve its local SEO.

Google, Yelp, and other local search sites rely on accurate data to provide a great experience for their searchers. That is why listings are responsible for over 45% of how Google determines its local search rankings.

A listings management tool gives brands full control over all of the data that is provided and submitted to local search sites and ensures that information like business name, address, phone number (NAP), website, store hours etc. is accurate and consistent across the web.

4.  Media Tracking

Tracking photos and digital media presents a similar issue to the one that large brands face when attempting to monitor all of their reviews: media and images are scattered all over the web and with so many locations it’s impossible to keep up with it manually.

Photos and videos provide brands with a great opportunity to see their customers engaging with their brands and products, however, they also pose the threat of having disastrous content go viral.

Just look at some of the photos that Chatmeter’s media tracking tool has helped brands resolve before they spread across the web:

A single incident at a single location could spell disaster for the entire brand. Media tracking is an essential tool for large brands looking to keep their reputation under control.

5.  A Local SEO Checklist

Competition in the local search results is intense, meaning brands need to do everything they can to improve their local SEO. A local SEO checklist helps brands to make sure they don’t miss a step when they are developing their own local SEO strategy. Here are a couple resources to ensure your local SEO strategy is up to par:

6.  A Local SEO News Outlet

The world of local SEO constantly growing and changing, but staying up-to-date with all that is going on in the industry can help you to stay one step ahead of your competitors. The Chatmeter Blog is a great resource for all the happening in the industry and how they influence the strategies for enterprise-level businesses. On top of that, a few of our favorite tools are Feedly and Buzzsumo.

• Feedly – A news aggregator that allows you to pull in articles from industry experts and local SEO news outlets all over the web. This will help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest articles as soon as they are released.
• Buzzsumo – Another news aggregator, Buzzsumo allows you to enter a keyword, like reputation management and local SEO, and then shows you the most popular content around those keywords based on the number of social shares that article has received. Buzzsumo is a great way to stay engaged with the most popular and trending articles around the web.

7. Free Location Audit

Already have a local SEO strategy in place and want to see how well it’s working? New to local SEO and want to figure out where you are doing well and where you could use some improvement? Chatmeter offers a free location audit that analyzes your locations’ local SEO success.

Chatmeter analyzes all of the major aspects such as reviews, social media, listings, media and rankings to help you determine exactly how well each of your locations is doing in the local search results, how you stack up against your local competitors, and how and where you can optimize.

Schedule your FREE location audit to analyze your local SEO health and learn more about how local SEO can help you drive more customers to your physical locations.