If you want to drive in-person traffic, phone calls, and sales from nearby searchers, you gotta be good at your local SEO game. And if you want to be good at it, you must learn to be efficient. Scaling local SEO across multiple locations is challenging.
Luckily, you can automate much of your local search marketing efforts with time-saving tools for consistency and higher performance. Let's explore these tools along with a strategic approach for leveraging automation to excel at local SEO in 2024.
Challenges in local search marketing: Why you need local SEO automation
Answer is simple – you’ll be doing 100 different things for SEO every day, and the list keeps growing with every Google update. Google’s algorithm has been more dynamic than ever in the past year. You need a helping hand with two key things:
Time-intensive tasks
Managing local SEO involves significantly more grunt work compared to regular SEO. You need to create and update business listings across dozens of sites, along with optimizing and promoting your Google My Business (GMB) profile.
Monitoring and compiling local SEO analytics like GMB insights and review sentiment takes manual effort. Responding to customer reviews across platforms is time-consuming. Creating localized landing pages and content requires additional resources.
For multi-location brands, these tasks compound quickly. Keeping each location's NAP (name, address, phone number) updated and consistent everywhere becomes burdensome. Doing this all manually results in distracted focus and inaccuracies.
Scaling local SEO strategies for multi-location brands
The complexity rises exponentially for brands managing multiple locations. Some challenges include:
Needing to optimize each location’s Google Business Profile listing individually
Creating unique landing pages and content for each region
Monitoring and compiling analytics for each location
It’s simply not viable to manually handle local SEO at scale. Yet optimizing locally is vital for multi-location success. That’s why it’s time to start thinking about automation.
Benefits of automation for local SEO
Automation helps you be more efficient, consistent, and accurate in carrying out your local search task list.
Time and resource savings
Automation tools handle the heavy lifting of local listings distribution, updating, monitoring, and reporting. This frees up immense time and overhead costs compared to manual management. You don't need dedicated staff constantly managing local SEO tasks.
Accuracy and consistency
Automated management ensures all your business locations have complete, consistent NAP details across directories. Automated monitoring quickly flags and fixes any inconsistencies or errors. This boosts local SEO authority.
Scalability
You can easily scale automated local SEO strategies across hundreds of business locations. The tools do the hard work of optimizing and tracking performance for each locality. Automation brings large-scale local search success within reach.
Essential Tools for Automating Local Search Marketing
Here is a list of automation tools you can use for some essential sets of tasks in local SEO.
Automation tools for local listings management
Managing listings on dozens of directories, aggregators, and review sites is a mammoth task. Automation tools help streamline this process and take away some of the burden off your shoulders.
The tool supports distribution to online directories, citation monitoring, advanced reporting, and custom data feeds. It provides a broad distribution reach to maximize your local search visibility and automated alerts to identify and fix inaccurate citations before they impact rankings.
Something I like – they have a local citation finder tool that helps you uncover new citation opportunities automatically for local SEO.
Pricing: Whitespark has a free plan and premium upgrade with tiered pricing starting from $39 to $149, depending on the number of locations.
Synup offers a complete suite of listings management and advanced local SEO automation features. We push your business listings to 60+ reputed publishers. You can create, review, and bulk edit listings at scale in less time than what it takes for you to finish your pumpkin-spiced latte. There are handy, single-click automation prompts ready for you to use to manage your listings quickly.
Pricing: Synup has a free trial plan and paid tiers starting at $34.99 per location per month (The pricing is uniform regardless of the number of locations you want to manage – so it is easy to scale up or down as you wish)
BrightLocal offers automation for distributing listings and monitoring the accuracy of business information. It pushes listings to top aggregators and directories while providing real-time alerts when issues arise. Key features include listing distribution, ongoing monitoring, a full citation audit, and cleanup service.
While listing management is one feature, BrightLocal is more centered around reporting and monitoring.
Pricing: Brightlocal has a free trial and paid tiered plan. For a single location, the pricing starts at $49 per month for listing management and goes up as you include more locations. Custom pricing starts for over 50 locations.
MozLocal centralizes local listings management and accuracy tracking. It helps you distribute to top sites, do ongoing monitoring with real-time alerts, and handle campaign reporting. One thing that stands out: MozLocal has deep integration with Moz's SEO tools for more wide-scale insights on your overall SEO health.
But my two cents here – Moz is built for large-scale SEO projects and doesn’t offer the same level of custom support and features, especially when it comes to listing management.
Pricing: The listing management feature starts at $14 per month for up to 5 locations. If you have more, you will need to get custom quotes.
In terms of automation capabilities, Synup stands out for our seamless syncing across top directories, one-click listing publishing and pretty much hands-off listings management.
Review management using local SEO automation tools
Managing customer reviews is vital for local search success. Tools like Synup, GatherUp, and ReviewTrackers help automate review generation, monitoring, and responses.
ReviewTrackers have powerful automation capabilities to monitor, analyze, and respond to customer reviews. You can review aggregation from dozens of sites, prioritized review alerts, and bulk response tools.
They also offer sentiment analysis and trends reporting, which provide insights to improve customer experience and the services you offer.
Synup excels at automated review management. You can configure templated responses for common review types that are automatically posted. We also seamlessly aggregate your reviews from dozens of sites into a unified dashboard.
Big shoutout to the automated review acquisition feature: Synup connects directly with your CRM and helps you get new reviews rolling in with custom email and SMS campaigns.
Birdeye offers a well-rounded local marketing platform spanning listings and review stimulation capabilities. It covers key local focus areas and advanced capabilities to manage reviews and online reputation. It will automatically generate and highlight positive reviews for you, along with widgets and surveys to capture customer feedback and sentiments.
If you wanna go one step further with comprehensive capabilities like multi-channel review collection, intelligent nudges, bulk responding, and unified analytics – Synup is an unbeatable automation tool.
Automated SEO reporting and analytics tools
You need to know what your local SEO efforts are resulting in. But why wait for bulky manual reports to come through every week when you can automate key insights from your local SEO automation tools. It will help you be in loop throughout and also give a breather to your data analysts and SEO guys.
Here are a few tools that give you a host of opportunities to automate SEO reporting.
Although a full-function SEO tool, you can use SEMrush to generate automated reports for local performance. It will give you insights on local organic and map pack performance for target keywords. You can automate position tracking for your target keywords and also run automated site audits to get a general check of your website.
Just like SEMrush, Ahref Provides automated tracking of local rankings across search engines and also carries out auto-audits of your website. You can choose to get email or Slack notifications for any ranking changes.
GSC is a tool you’re probably familiar with if you’re tracking the performance of your site. It shows you progress on rankings, indexed pages, and impressions for local results. And it already has automatic monthly email reports.
Did you know you can automate major data reporting processes in GSC? There are a few tools in Google suite itself that integrate really well with GSC and help you create seamless, automated dashboards.
Looker Studio: allows you to create custom dashboards that automatically update with your GSC data. You can visualize your website's performance in various ways, such as tracking clicks, impressions, CTR (click-through rate), and position for queries and pages.
Google Sheets: You can automate SEO data reporting with Google Apps Script. Use the Google Search Console API to fetch data. Write a Google Apps Script to pull data into a Google Sheet. Schedule the script to run at regular intervals (daily, weekly, etc.).
You can also use third-party SEO automation software like SEMrush or Ahref to create automated GSC reports.
Don’t limit your usage of analytics to manual reports. You can do a lot more with simple automations. You can schedule custom alerts on key changes in local SEO metrics (for example, traffic increase/drops that may link to a new Google update) on GA4.
On your GA4 home page, you will see the insights section when you scroll down.
If you click on reports and then view all insights tab, you’ll see the option to create/manage insights.
Next, you can set up custom insights and email alerts (up to 50) when any metric under any dimension changes (for example, an alert when traffic drops by more than 20%)
Looker studio is a beauty! You can build automated dashboards that fetch your data from multiple sources – GSC, Google Analytics, Ads, and even your Google Business profile. Here’s how:
Go to Looker Studio and sign in with your Google account.
Click on "+ Create" and select "Report" from the dropdown. You'll be prompted to add data to your report.
For Google Analytics, GSC, and Google Business Profile insights, you can easily connect by selecting the respective connectors and authorizing Looker Studio to access your data.
For other SEO tools or custom data sources, you may need to use the "Community Connectors" available in Looker Studio or use data exported in Google sheets
You can choose from a number of visualization options – charts, line graphs, tables, geo maps, and a lot more to your dashboard. You can also add filters and other controls to the dashboard. Now this step will take you some time to build and refine. Be patient.
Once you have a shareable dashboard ready, you can start automating the updates. Click on the report settings and find options for scheduling email delivery. You can set it to send updates daily, weekly, or monthly to yourself or stakeholders.
Keep monitoring to make sure your data is accurate and nothing is off (quite common with such dashboards, trust me)
Develop an automation strategy for local search marketing
Only having a bunch of SEO automation tools won’t cut it for you. It’ll all be chaotic and disconnected if you don’t have a local SEO automation strategy in place. So, learn how to build a strategy to leverage these tools.
Step 1: Setting up for success: initial steps
The first steps are to define your local marketing goals and figure out what level of investment you want to put into it.
Local SEO Goals: What KPIs like rankings, traffic, and conversions are you aiming for?
Target Locations: Define the geographic areas you want to focus on.
Tools Stack: Determine which automation tools best suit your business' size, budget, and needs. We suggest going for free trials first and then upgrading.
Integrations: Connect your CRM and analytics platforms to any tools you are using for a unified view of your performance.
Take time to lay this groundwork for maximum impact from automation.
Step 2: Automating local listings and citations management
Listings distribution should be your first priority task when you set out to automate. It keeps your highest priority locations updated continuously without daily manual management.
Simply upload your business data, and there are tools that populate listings across directories. Synup expands your reach further by publishing to over 80+ directories – from prominent ones like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Mapquest to niche sites.
You can also schedule regular audits using monitoring features so that you can identify listings requiring updates. For example, inaccurate NAP details need correction. This prevents citation issues that could negatively impact your local SEO rankings.
Step 3: Leveraging automation for engaging customers
One thing that reflects positively on your local brand is how engaged you are with local customers. Generate more customer reviews is by sending timely, relevant feedback requests. Automation tools allow you to create customized review request workflows.
For example, Synup enables setting up automated review generation campaigns triggered by specific events – like within 5 days of a completed project or purchase. We do this by connecting with your CRM or apps.
You can also configure templated responses so positive reviews receive a personalized thank you comment, while negative ones are answered with an offer to make it right. This level of automation scales and enhances your review building.
You can also run automated local customer engagement campaigns (Synup has this feature). Let your customers know when you have an event, want to roll out new offers, or just have some exciting announcement (like a new store launch). You can pick exactly which location runs these campaigns, when to send it, and how often.
Step 4: Enhancing content and on-page SEO automatically
Several automation tools can streamline content creation and on-page optimization for local SEO. Tech-enabled solutions scale the creation of pages and posts optimized for target regions.
Note: One thing I don’t suggest entirely automating is your content creation process. Make sure you always keep a personalized touch to it so your customers can connect with you better. (And that’s what Google also wants to see)
Tools like Moz and SEMrush automatically optimize and populate important on-page elements like title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and schema markup. This amplifies the local relevance of your pages. Social media management platforms like Synup enable auto-scheduling of localized content for distribution.
Common misconceptions about automation in local SEO
Automation can be scary to a lot of people, and sometimes, for good reasons. Here are a few myths that often float around in the marketing corners.
“Automation makes your efforts impersonal”
Some believe automation hurts customer connections, but the truth is it frees up more time for meaningful outreach. Listings and campaign management are automated, but human interaction remains vital.
“Automation can hurt your rankings”
Done right, automation has no negative SEO impact. Avoid tools using shady tactics to flood the search engines with useless content. Properly configured automation will always complement and enhance your overall efforts.
“Automation is only for large enterprises”
Local automation tools are now accessible for small businesses, too. Many offer free plans or low monthly costs. In fact, all of Google’s tools are absolutely free of cost. What’s stopping you? You can also choose to control which features to enable as you scale.
Summing Up…
The key is picking advanced yet easy-to-use automation platforms tailored to your business's specific needs and budget. Synup provides robust capabilities if you are just getting started with local SEO automation.
Next steps?
Begin by auditing your existing strategy to identify the highest pain points and ROI opportunities for automation.
Establish clear local KPIs and use connected analytics tools to benchmark progress.
Start small by automating one or two fundamental tasks, then expand the automation stack as you generate results.
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