Whitespark is Edmonton based full service agency. You could ask why would we write about competitors in our own country? Well, because these guys created a very cool local backlink research tool that we took for a spin yesterday and loved it. The tool is called Local Citation Finder Tool.
How it this SEO tool works:?
Identify Competitors: This is where the tool really excels. We tried to search for “Plumbers Toronto” and the tool found 10 competitors from the first page. The thing is though, that this is from a first page that would be displayed for someone who is searching from Toronto – which allows the tool to find real competitors. We used a lot of tools in the past that would try to automate SEO research process, but would not identify the right competitors – as a result all the automatic findings had no value. So we loved how it found exactly the guys we are trying to compete with.
Find Unique Citation: Instead of trying to search for every website that links to a competitor – a tool find a unique citation: phone number. The idea for it the local SEO, so if a website includes competitor’s phone number there is a high possibility that it is either a local directory or a blog.
Find all the links with citation: The tool then searches for all the websites that have competitor’s phone number. Searching for these websites as opposed to all the websites that link to a competitor really helps with localized SEO campaign.
Organize Links: A tool then organized links by the amount of citations, so for example if YP is linking to 7 of your competitors (assuming each competitor has only one link) it would show up high in the list, then would be a directory that links to 6 of your competitors.
Bottom Line:
The tool is free and is a convenient add on to your research for local SEO campaign. Of course it won’t identify all the potential link opportunities, as you don’t want to just copy your competitors – you want to be the best and do better. However, it is a great time saver as a starting point. Guys from Whitesprak did a great job, thank you!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the review Roman! Glad you like the Local Citation Finder. I’ll be releasing an improved version of the free tool in a few days.
Well actually thank you! We liked it. Good luck with Local Citation Finder!