Here are some excellent local search tools. I wanted to mention several that I have used and continue to use in my local search engine marketing work.

Local Search Tool -Get Listed.Org

GetListed.org is a very useful free tool I have been using for many of my Local SEO campaigns. GetListed has been around since January of 2009 , but they recently changed to a dashboard view to track many more local listing indexes. They currently will track your business addresses on Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Best of the Web,HotFrog and Brownbook. Getlisted currently also operates in the USA and UK. It is the brainchild of local search experts David Mihm and Patrick Sexton. David is also the author in chief of a annual survey called Local Search Ranking Features which is one of the best sources on the web for local search engine marketing information.

They have also put out in beta a version for the Canadian Market which integrates with the Canadian Yellow Pages and have a business relationship with Universal Business Listings.

Local Search Tool-Whitespark.ca Local Citation Finder

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder is a joint effort from Edmonton SEO practioner Darren Shaw and Ontolo’s Garrett French.

Given the importance of citations in local search this tool allows you to :
1. Identify your local competitors (by probably just searching for your main keyword + territory)
2. Identify local “footprints” (say, local phone numbers as it is demonstrated in the post);
3. Search Google using each of the footprints;
4. Identify “co-citation” (unique domains that have listed several of those footprints);
5. Check the unique results as well (those that only mentioned one of the footprint).

For example you may be looking for “kitchener plumbers”.It would supply you with a list of all the sites where there are citations and provide you with the occurrences and the relative ranking importance of those citations. Very useful data to start you on your way to establish a firm local footprint. It also permits you to search by telephone numbers also. It is a prime local search tool for local internet search engine marketing discovery.
Thanks to Darren and Garrett for making this worthwhile local search tool available, which works around the world in local markets where you identify the prime local engine you wish to get the results from.

Local Search Tool- Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO operated from Birmingham in the UK gives you a wide selection of reporting on Competitive Search Intelligence. They provide access to their massive global independent index and provide both free and paid products. As a paid user I can attest that I have not been able to find so quickly economically important competitive search intelligence and find local search competitive data.

I like their description of what they do:

“Majestic-12 Ltd trades as Majestic SEO to provide Competitor backlinks intelligence to SEO specialists. We believe we are the planet’s most comprehensive backlinks information provider, and offer a number of tools to access to this valuable resource.

In addition to our free services, we enable registered users to test our services free of charge by generating reports for sites they control. Registration is free, and our highly competitive subscription plans start at low prices, with 1 month minimum commitment, and offer a number of tools to enable analysis of competing domains to be performed. For Enterprise users, we offer an API service for internal use which enables developers to integrate our data into new or existing suites of reports and applications.” You can find more at MajesticSEO.

The strength of their value comes from the depth of information they have collected over the years and the speed which they can give link data back to you by domain. They have both basic and advanced reporting tools which provide you a summary of your links and allow you to drill down on a very granular level. The Site Explorer Tool is much better in my point of view than the free webmaster tools provided by Google Yahoo and Bing themselves. You can also ascertain if any of your domains are residing on servers in bad neighbourhoods, or you are getting links from bad neighbourhoods.

Their link history data allows you to assess where you were and where you are now in terms of rankings and links and the data is easy to understand and drill down as a local search tool. Visit them yourself at MajesticSeo.com to try them for yourself free of charge.

I hope you find these local search tool descriptions invaluable in your local search marketing as I have. Let me know in the comments if you have any favorites of your own local search tools.