Tools and strategies to optimize your Google Business Profile for maximum local visibility.
The Google Business Profile Manager (formerly Google My Business) is the essential, free tool for managing your local presence. It lets you update business info, respond to reviews, post updates, add photos, and see insights. Every local business must have this set up and optimized. It's the foundation of local SEO.
Essential for: Every local business.
BrightLocal is a local SEO tool that tracks your local rankings, monitors reviews across sites, audits your Google Business Profile, and manages local citations. Plans start at $39/month. Best for businesses serious about local SEO that want to track and improve their local search performance.
Best for: Local rank tracking and citation management.
Whitespark is a local citation building service. They manually build citations across local directories to improve your local search rankings. They also offer a local rank tracker and Google Business Profile tracker. Best for businesses that want professional citation building without doing it manually.
Best for: Professional local citation building.
ReviewTrackers is a review monitoring and management tool. It aggregates reviews from Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other sites into one dashboard. It also helps you request reviews from customers. Best for businesses that want to monitor and build reviews across multiple platforms.
Best for: Review monitoring and generation.
Podium is a customer interaction platform that helps you collect reviews via text message, manage messages from Google Business Profile, and process payments. It's powerful but more expensive. Best for businesses that want an all-in-one tool for reviews, messaging, and customer interaction.
Best for: All-in-one review collection and customer messaging.
Start with the free Google Business Profile Manager — it's essential. For tracking and improving local rankings, BrightLocal is the best value. For citation building, Whitespark is professional and reliable. For review generation, a simple text-message review request system (which we can set up) often works as well as expensive tools. We manage Google Business Profiles for our local SEO clients — contact us.