12 Local Citation Software Tools You Need for Local SEO

Anyone who learns about local SEO will very quickly come to understand the importance of citations. They are one of the foundational building blocks for creating an online presence in your local market. If you’re a small business, you likely already know this.

However, time as a small business is precious. You only have so many hours in the day to run your business, and managing local citations can take a lot of work — but it doesn’t have to. There are several local citation software tools you can use to save yourself a lot of time and effort.

We break down 12 of the best SEO tools for helping with citations that we have experience using. First, let’s talk about what location citation software actually is.

What Is Local Citation Software?

The short and simple answer is that it is a tool or resource you can use to make managing local citations faster and easier. If you need to create new citations for a new location you are opening, you don’t have to manually create them everywhere online.

Likewise, if you change your business name you don’t have to manually update every local citation you already have created.

Local citation software lets you automate the process, or pass on the work to an experienced local SEO professional to do it for you.

The benefit to a business is primarily to save you time when managing your citations. It does this by either giving you the tools to automate some of the work, or by managing it completely on your behalf. However, you also get the benefit of the local SEO expertise that goes into creating and running the software or tool.

Let’s look at 12 examples to show how it all works.

Local Citation Software

1. Whitespark

Whitespark is a complete local SEO resource, with a big focus on local citations. It has two tools to help manage your citations, and a wealth of guides and articles to help you optimize your process. For instance, they will list the top major citation sources in a given country.

The local citation finder tool is the bread and butter for a local business. It helps you find new opportunities to make citations through target keywords, locations, and competitor comparisons. Once you finish making the major citations, this tool is a major help to find more.

In addition, they also have a local rank tracker tool to help see how your rankings are affected by your citation building campaign. They also provide citation building, citation audit and citation cleanup services for a subscription where they manage your citations for you.

2. Yext

Yext is similar to Whitespark, in that its software helps you manage every aspect of your local SEO. You can also choose from specific products and services according to what you want or need. For local citations, the main product you will be interested in is their Yext Listings tool.

You simply choose the country where your business is based, and then select the type of listing you want to target. For example, you can pick listings by a specific industry, which include events, food, healthcare, and more. Alternatively, you can choose by citation type such as directories, data aggregators, and search engines.

As you update the filters, Yext will show you relevant and authoritative sources to build your citations. You can check them one by one to create or fix your citations on each, or you can subscribe to one of their services that includes local citation management.

3. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers is an online location citation software that is mostly concerned with managing your local online reviews. However, a major part of getting online reviews is having local citations on review sites to begin with. As such, one of their tools includes managing business listings.

Since online reviews are just as important as business citations for your local SEO, it can be a valuable service. This is especially true if you really want something that combines managing your reviews and citations together to save even more time.

However, ReviewTrackers is lacking in any free tool or resource that you can use to do the work yourself and save money. All their tools or resources are paid.

4. Moz Local

Moz Local is a relatively new but highly sophisticated local citation software tool from Moz. It has the same quality you would expect from them, being one of the biggest players in the world of SEO and local SEO.

Moz Local’s tool allows you to enter your country, business name and address into their tool, and it scans the web for your online presence. It will display a list of each citation source, one by one, and grade the listing accuracy — or mark it as missing — including if it lists your hours or includes photos.

This makes your citation building and cleanup a breeze. You can export the list to save for future use, and share the link with other employees or your team that works on them. It also includes a service with multiple plan levels to have them manage the work for you.

5. Synup

Synup, as it says on their home page, is a one-stop-shop for local marketing based on an “AI-powered platform”. It uses its AI technology to analyze your business and your market to figure out how to better drive new customers through your doors.

One of the products their platform provides is managing and improving your online presence to make sure your potential customers can find you. This is where local citations are tied in. It’s a very sophisticated platform that touches on other elements of SEO, local SEO and digital marketing.

Like ReviewTrackers, it does not offer any free tools or resources to do the work for you. However, it can be a highly valuable service to manage every aspect of your online marketing, including your

6. Local SEO Checklist

Made by Synup, Local SEO Checklist is a fantastic (and free!) website and resource to help you formulate a comprehensive local SEO campaign. It breaks everything down into each necessary step, and provides tips, tools, and guides for each one.

It’s a great free resource if you want to manage your local SEO yourself to save money, but you need help and guidance on how to do it. It also includes a page that lists, links to, and shows prices for every major local citation service — including some that we talk about here.

Finally, it includes a free local citation scanning tool so you can see the current state of your business’ online listings. You provide your business information, including locations if you have more than one, and it shows you a quick report on your local citation profile.

It will show you how many sites are relevant to your local market and if your business has a presence on each. If it does, it will assess if it has fully accurate and consistent information, or if it has anything missing or incorrect. It makes it easy to find issues you need to fix.

7. SEMrush

SEMRush is a complete SEO platform, including local SEO products and tools like local citations. Its party piece is the Listing Management tool you can use to check and update your citation listings across several online sources.

You provide your business information such as your business name, address and phone number and it will check the state of your listings. You can also then send your correct information to each source and insure it stays accurate without being changed.

This Listing Management tool is only available for businesses in either the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, however. So any businesses outside of it will be out of luck until the expand its availability.

8. BrightLocal

Bright Local is a software provider similar to Whitespark and Yext. It is a total local SEO platform beyond just local citations, but has its roots in providing tools and services for it. It provides multiple levels and allows you to build your campaign how you want.

You can set up an account and provide all the relevant information for your local business, including multiple locations. You can then select from their list of major and niche citation sources, as well as data aggregators that send your information across multiple online platforms.

Their products are all paid, but does include a tool that you can manage yourself for cheaper — just $2 per individual website submission. You can also choose from around 1,600 potential sites for citations, though not all will be relevant to your industry and location.

That can allow you to slowly update and build citations over time for a very manageable amount of money, rather than one big hit. It also means you do not have to subscribe or cancel a plan, you use it how and when you want.

9. Advice Local

Advice Local, as its name and website say outright, is a local SEO management software platform. They do not have any free tools to use like some others listed here, but they do have a listings management service. You give them your location information and they take care of the rest.

What is notable about them is that they take a hybrid approach to pushing your citations out to the various online sources. They will use an API they have connected to some platforms, but will use manual submissions for others.

The combination works well for some citation sources that are notoriously fickle when it comes to their platforms. It helps avoid situations where the API can get disconnected at times, and you lose that citation temporarily.

10. Tribe Local

Tribe Local is another local SEO software platform that covers citations as well as reviews, rank tracking, analytics, lead generation, and so on. They are similar to Advice Local in that they use their software to manage every aspect of local SEO. They are geared more to marketing agencies, however.

If your business acts as a marketing agency for other businesses in your area, this can be a very effective way to help your clients’ local SEO. This is especially helpful if you do not specialize in either online, or in SEO and local SEO specifically.

You can use their business citations tool to manage your client’s local listings. It will free up your time to manage other areas that need a more hands-on approach. That way you can serve your clients with a more complete array of services.

11. My Presences

My Presences is all about managing and growing your online presence as a local business. That means they have a good focus on citations, as it helps increase your appearances across multiple websites but also on search engines.

They have an “online presence management” service that includes being present, accurate, and complete on things like directories and citation websites. However, their other mantras are to be memorable, and to monitor and report on the status of each presence you have.

That can help you really optimize your citations and profiles on the major local citation sources such as Google My Business, Bing, Yelp, and so on.

12. Uberall

Uberall is another local SEO software platform that has its main focus on the three pillars of the current and future: citations, reviews, and voice search. They have three products on their platform that can help your local citation listings.

First is their listings tool, where you can manage the consistency and presence of your listings across the major websites, directories and apps. Second, they have a listings and directories network that includes more than 125 platforms that you can check for free.

Last, they have a local landing page and store locator service. You can use it to drive traffic from your citations to these pages to help convert more of them into customers.

Summary

It can be hard work and very time consuming to try and manage all of your listings manually. That’s why any of the 12 local citation software tools mentioned above can be highly useful for any local business. You save time doing the work the hard way, and you get the benefit of the local SEO expertise put into their tools and services.

Almost all of them will also cover every other important aspect of local SEO. That can be your online reviews, voice search optimization, link building among local websites, and so on. With a bit of research and trying out some free demos, you can find the right tools and services for your business.