The Complete List Of Local SEO Tools (90+ Free and Paid Tools)

28 minutes read
Local SEO Tools

It has become extremely commonplace for modern-day businesses to have their own e-stores. What was once considered an accessory has now become a mandatory part of the business plan. Such is the power of an online store.

Optimizing for local search engine results has now become an important element in the marketing strategy for online businesses with physical locations. All businesses want to be found by customers by featuring in local search results. The good news is that this is achievable with the help of certain local SEO tools. This includes tools related to keyword research, business listings, citation finders, schema creators, plagiarism checkers, ranking trackers, and so on.

Read on to know about the web-based tools that you can utilize in realizing your SEO goals.

Go-To Local SEO Tools

1. Local SEO Checklist

  • Local SEO Checklist

  • Cost: Complete checklists provided by the website are free of cost. They will indicate the areas that need to be focussed upon.

About: The Local SEO Checklist gives you a simple step-by-step checklist that you can use to monitor your optimization efforts. The great thing about this tool is that it tracks your progress continuously. It will do so even if you close your browser and re-open it, as long as your browser’s cache is cleared.

  • Among the many local SEO elements available on this website, you can optimize your title tag with your location and the services you offer.
  • Create a blog on your website and check for duplicate content.
  • Check for local schemas on web pages.
  • Optimize your Google Business profile by adding correct information and media.
  • Put a “Review’ widget or add a ‘Write a review’ button. Plus, respond to negative reviews without wasting time.
  • BrightLocal

  • Cost: 14-day free trial. Their CitationBurst service is free to use. Several paid plans are available for other services.

About: If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to track your local and organic search rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo, then opt for their 14-day free trial plan. BrightLocal can help you with tracking key search terms across these search engines. You can also see how the keywords are faring on Google blended searches.

  • The most notable service provided by them is CitationBurst (more on that later), a high-quality citation-building tool. It also makes it easy to build and manage local directory listings.
  • The website allows you to not only track local citations and find new citation sites, but also monitor your NAV.
  • It enables you to locate and deal with harmful and duplicate listings quickly and effectively.
  • You can keep a watchful eye on your competitors, and identify local and niche citations to fortify your position.
  • It also reduces SEO audit time considerably, and provides you with easy-to-understand, branded reports.
  • It also reduces SEO audit time considerably, and provides you with easy-to-understand, branded reports.
  • Their services are currently available only in 10 countries.

About: This tool makes it easy to scan landing pages or website URLs to check for the optimization of your targeted key phrase.

  • This is the one-stop-tool for all your checklist needs. It provides you with all the steps involved in fully optimizing your local/Google My Business listings and sites.
  • Their website SEO checklist enables you to confirm your website’s searchability.
  • Their landing page checklist will equip you with some of the best landing page practices.
  • Use their Keyword Strategy Checklist to enhance your visibility and improve your content strategy.
  • All you have to do is fill out their online form and you will be provided with the required checklist in PDF format.

Alternatives: Here are a few alternatives that can help you with local SEO checklists –

Screaming Frog SEO Spider
BROWSEO
UpCityWooRank

2. Local SEO Keyword Research Tools

About: Small business owners looking to attract local web traffic will find this tool to be useful in generating targeted keyword lists.

  • Some of the most remarkable advantages of using this tool include the ease that users enjoy when searching by keywords and finding websites that contain any or all the keywords, or even the exact keyphrase.
  • The tool is perfect for small businesses looking to create a solid online presence and sort out their marketing efforts.
  • The tool offers a free and easy way to manage not only your website, but also employee schedules and marketing schedules.
  • Its features enable you to maintain a list of your website’s visitors, which is emailed to you at regular intervals.
  • Use this tool to add various media that allows you to showcase your products and services to their fullest potential.

About: Google’s Keyword Planner tool comes in handy for businesses looking to create new Search Network campaigns or develop existing ones.

  • From among its many advantages, Keyword Planner lets you search for keywords, ad group ideas, historical data, traffic forecasts, keyword performance, and even multiply lists of keywords to create a new one.
  • It can also help you pick suitable bids and budgets to use with your campaigns.
  • You can use this tool to get estimates on clicks and conversions to figure out how your keywords may perform under a specific budget and bid.
  • What’s more? If you have a list of keywords ready, you can feed them into the tool to determine how they have been faring.
  • SEMrush

  • Cost: Pricing starts at $69.95 per month

About: SEMrush can be your go-to online marketing tool when it comes to creating vital data for developing strategies for SEO, link building, and advertising. It can be of immense help to digital marketing professionals and business owners. The tool was built with the objective of revving up day-to-day online marketing activities while monitoring website performance.

  • This tool enables you to keep a close watch on your competitor’s best keywords. It helps you stay one step ahead by identifying new competitors through organic research and track the position of their domains.
  • It helps you with advertising research by helping you unearth and analyze your competitor’s ad strategies, ad copies, keywords, and budgets.
  • You can discover new competitors in AdWords and Bing Ads, apart from localizing your ad campaigns.
  • It allows you to use its data to compare competitive domains and forecast keyword difficult in a matter of clicks.
  • It enables you to commence global campaigns for your website and equips you with the metrics related to competitors, keyword rankings, and on-page health.

Alternatives:Apart from the above, you can also consider the following similar tools –

Keyword Tool
KeywordSpy
GeoRanker
WordStream
Keyword EyeKeyword Discovery
Übersuggest
Advanced Web Ranking

3. Preliminary Questionnaire

About: If you think your business isn’t getting found at the rate it should be, you need this Questionnaire.

  • Phil Rozek has developed this Questionnaire with the view to help businesses augment their local visibility in search engine results.
  • Simply fill out his 2-page questionnaire (available on the website) and email it to Phil, and he will devise a step-by-step local visibility campaign that suits your business’s needs the most.
  • Thanks to the ‘Local Visibility X-Ray’ tool, you can enhance your local rankings and reach a wider customer base with some custom SEO auditing.
  • If you think you need a one-on-one consultation with Paul, you can get in touch with him, fix a particular date and time for a telephonic conversation and sort out your local visibility woes.
  • Maintain positive reviews and rankings for your website with some help from Phil and this ingenious online tool.

4. Citation Management Tools

  • Moz Local

  • Cost: $84 per year for Listing Distribution services. $120 per year add-on for Search Insights services.

About: Want to know about where you can send in online business listing and start raking in the moolah? Moz can be your best ally.

  • This tool looks through the biggest search directories, determines whether or not you’re listed, helps with fixing issues, and lets you take stock of listings of your business that you haven’t already.
  • Simply enter your business name and zip code and it will present all the addresses your business has. Once you select the correct address, it will give you a complete report which will depict your completed, incomplete, inconsistent and duplicate listings.
  • The tool also tells you of the places where your business isn’t listed. You can provide your business information to multiple directories simultaneously. Further, you can update your information on a regular basis.
  • BrightLocal

  • Cost: 14-day free trial. Prices range from $29 to $79 per month depending on the plan you choose.

About: Brightlocal brings you the CitationBurst tool which lets you access their database of over 1600+ citation sources. It gives you the freedom to pick and choose the directories to which you want to submit your listings. You can either do the submissions yourself or get the Brightlocal team to do it for you.

  • Use this tool to clear out your current citations, rectify inaccurate information, and create new directory listings that establish your local authority in Google.
  • The tool also helps you with updating and/or submitting to renowned websites like Google+Local and Yelp. Further, you can also send your information to data aggregators like InfoUSA and Axicom.
  • Through this tool, you can take ownership of your citations. This means you control the information that is displayed. You can also update it whenever you want to.
  • That’s not all! This tool enables you to prevent third parties from publishing false information about your business.
  • Yext

  • Cost: Varies according to services availed

About: Yext is a citation finder tool that also provides various other services. It allows you to list your websites on the business listings that your business does not feature in. You can also monitor your reviews and track your business’s local search performance with the help of their local search analytics.

  • With Yext, you’re in charge of your company listing across over 100 of their global partners, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, Maps, and Bing.
  • Their award winning technology makes it possible for you to determine how often a listing shows up in local search results, the number of views a page receives, and the number of times visitors click on a message.
  • You can also track and search reviews in real time in accordance with your location across every PowerListing website that supports them. Additionally, you get notified for every new review and search review by location. This enables you to compare how feedback varies across different times and locations.
  • Save yourself the time and cost of preventing the appearance of duplicated data of your business information and make use of the SEO benefits that this tool provides. Yext finds and curbs duplicate listings so that customers only see authentic and accurate information about your business. This lends it more authority and consistency.

Alternatives: In case you wish you consider other tools, here are a few interesting options –

Whitespark
Synup
NAPtune
N.A.P. HUNTER!Places Scout

      1. (Citation Finder)

Advice Local

      1. (Citation Finder)

Universal Business Listing
Neustar Localeze
SyCara Local
LocalVox

5. Build Citations Manually

  • RoboForm

  • Cost: Download the password manager for free. The licensed software costs $9.95 in the first year.

About: A password managing tool, Roboform also allows you to build citations. Simply enter the information about a location and let it auto-fill on a few submission sites. Setting it up and saving the information may be a manual affair, but it will save you a lot of time and effort in the long term.

  • The tool ensures to save the data you enter it and allows you to share it with your team members.
  • Furthermore, it integrates into your browser. You can click on the drop-down menu and select the auto-fill information you want.
  • Using this ensures to check that you’re not already listed before you start adding your lists to websites.

Alternatives: You may also want to consider InFormEnter addon.

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6. Structured Data Inspector

  • Synup

  • Cost: $25 per location per month.

About: Synup is a great tool to use when you want to run a website to determine whether or not you have relevant schema marked up content. It can also generate a list of pages that have no schema installed.

  • It can crawl over 200 local search engines and directories and detect inconsistencies in the data.
  • It sends immediate notifications when your customers leave a review or a comment. It has an integrated workflow that enables you to respond from within Synup.
  • Using this tool’s integrated analytics, you can track web rankings, traffic, and more.

About: The Google Structured Data Testing Tool helps you determine what content on your website is marked, and reports errors (if any) in the manner your schema-ed content is marked up. This tool can be particularly helpful if you have doubts about parts of your website having schema that aren’t being read/interpreted properly.

  • This tool lets you examine your markup and ensure that Google can mine the structured data from your page.
  • To make things easier for you to understand, this tool displays the markup found on a specific web page, as well as a preview of how that page might appear in Google search results.

About: The Structured Data Linter helps webmasters and web developers ascertain the presence of structured data in their HTML pages.

  • Search engines make use of structured data to understand webpages more accurately and display enhanced search results. The Linter reads the microdata, JSON-LD and RDFa formats. However, this does not imply that every consumer of data will make use of all the structured data available on your page. Currently, the Linter does not read microformats.
  • The Linter performs limited vocabulary validations for schema.org, Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol, and Dublin Core Metadata Terms, among others. Apart from that, it also provides snippet visualizations for schema.org.

Alternatives: Check out the following alternatives to the above tools that you can use to get the job done –

Yandex
Semantic Inspector
Bing – Webmaster Tools

7. Schema Creator

  • Schema Scanner

  • Cost: Free

About: Search engines use structured data to understand your content in your HTML. Hence, Google and other search engines came up with a structured data standard in the form of schema.org

  • This tool makes it easy for you to get started with creating HTML with schema.org microdata.
  • Thanks to this tool, you can easily find some of the most popular schemas to create.
  • It is extremely easy to use. After creating a schema, all you need to do is copy and paste the code to your site or add additional item properties to it.

About: Make use of this tool to build a list of local generators that would interest businesses looking to mark up their name, address and contact number using schema.org terms.

  • Using this tool is pretty easy. Simply find your segment from across the list provided on their page. You can also the ‘Local Business (NAP)’ to find your segment. Enter the required information and hit the ‘Generate’ button.
  • In order to ensure that search engines synthesize your information accurately, you can copy and paste the code in the Rich Snippet Tester (HTML Tab).
  • Thereafter, you can paste the code on your site (Footer). Yes, it’s that simple!

About: The schema creator by 51blocks helps you create a structured markup for your website, which is supported by all major search engines.

  • To use it, simply enter your business details. This will generate a code for you at the bottom. Copy and paste this code to your website, and you’re done!

Alternatives: A few other tools worth considering in this regard are as follows –

Seo Chat
WordPress.org
TVS Internet Marketing

8. Free Review Monitoring

About: As the name of the tool suggest, the tool can be helpful in monitoring your reviews on most review websites for free.

  • The tool can do so on a day-to-day basis. It sends out an email with new reviews as and when they are crawled.
  • Monitoring reviews can be extremely beneficial to businesses for a number of reasons. For starters, you get to know whether or not your customers are happy with you through online reviews. Prospects will come to you only if your reviews influence them positively.
  • All your reviews are presented to you in one place with various monitoring tools at your disposal.
  • This tool is trusted and use by over 12000 businesses.

About: BrandMentions is one of the most effective methods of monitoring your brand on the Internet.

  • It is the tool that searches all the digital corners for the mentions of your brand or a relevant keyword for your business.
  • BrandMentions scans the entire web and all the important social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc.).
  • It also sends you real-time alerts, 24/7, and it also allows you to engage in online conversations in real-time, directly from the app.

About: Every local business receives online reviews and feedback from their customers. Google Alerts can help you receive important alerts every time your brand is mentioned on all the major review sites.

  • With just one keyword, Google Alerts picks up your mentions as they appear on various online platforms.
  • Keep plagiarism at bay by entering specific text from your published works in the Search query field. Google will catch any mention of it online and bring it to your notice via email notifications for further action.

Alternatives: If you’re looking for other tools that carry out the same functions as the above ones, here’s a list –

BuzzBundle
Vendasta
SweetIQ
Reputology
ReviewTrackers
GetFiveStars
MentionBrightLocal

9. Review Handout Generator

About: If you’re a local business that wants to get noticed by the right audience, then you need Whitespark. This is one tool that enables search engines and prospective clients to find you easily.

  • Whitespark is great for you if you want to find local citations of your business on the Internet.
  • Sign up with Whitespark for free and you can perform three searches per day. To use it, simply choose between desktop and mobile as your platform. Enter the necessary business information. Save it in the PDF format and feel free to take prints and hand them out to your customers.
  • The tool can be customized to suit your business needs, which can get you more reviews and improve your rankings.

About: This tool takes the frustration out of working with a complex review-generating tool and helps you get better reviews. It is fast and easy, so you can’t go wrong with it. What you’re left with is a single-page handout with four simple steps and pictures.

  • One of the many great things about this tool is that it can be tailored to suit the exact needs of your business and even industry.
  • The information you enter can be saved in the PDF format, which can be easily printed or emailed to customers depending on their convenience.
  • The tool is compatible with almost every device, such as desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet.
  • Translation Journa

  • Cost: Free

About: Simply put, this tool is an online journal for translators, interpreters, and all those connected with the field of translation. It can also help businesses with posting client testimonials and other marketing materials likes catalogues and brochures to your website.

  • Using this tool, you can also edit the text written by the client (with his/her permission).
  • This tool makes it possible for you to post client reviews on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.
  • You can post client testimonials in audio and video formats.
  • You can also provide new referrals and introductions to prospective clients with the help of this tool.

Alternatives: Apart from the above tools, you can also consider the following tools for generating and handing out reviews for your business –

Grade.us
ModernComment
Customer Lobby

10. Zip Code Tool

About: Google rankings matter to businesses. In order to improve your rankings, you want to ensure that the business information you provide is consistent and accurate. This tool makes sure that you always publish your correct zip code.

  • With the help of this tool, you can rest assured that the zip code you provide is always in keeping with your business address.
  • All you need to do enter the name of your street, city and state, and this tool will provide you with the corresponding zip code.
  • The more accurate your business information, the better you rank on Google.
  • This tool can be particularly helpful to those businesses that have offices across multiple geographical locations.

About: This is another great tool that helps you get the right zip codes according to your city and state.

  • All you need to do is enter a radius to search within specific kilometres or miles.
  • Proceed by either clicking on the map or entering an address or zip code in the centre of your search. The results will appear inside the specified radius. To see the zip code, you can hover over a marker.
  • Further, you will also a list of zip codes in the text box in the CSV output station.
  • However, the radius has its limits and the result can take a long time to load.

About: This easy-to-use tool is a great option if you want to generate the right zip code for your business.

  • Simply key in the address that you need a zip code for. Select ‘Lookup and Verify’. The tool will authenticate and standardize the address entered with a ZIP+4 in accordance with the guidelines of the United States Postal Service.

Alternatives: Do try out the following alternatives to the above tools before you decide which one works best for you –

Melissa DATA
SearchBug

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11. Industrial Category Tool

About: Selecting the right category with the Local Business Center (LBC) is crucial to success with Google Maps. For any given search, categories are critical to your relevancy. They should be consistent with your long and short tail priorities. It is, therefore, important that you choose them carefully as you only get to enter five.

  • Google LBC categories have been integrated with searchable database of certain websites. This websites presents one such tool for search through over 2000 categories, which includes geographical locations.

About: This tool can be useful to businesses in suggesting a list of specific categories to help Google to show your business in the right searches.

  • This tool allows you to choose specific categories instead of broad ones. All you need to do is pick the appropriate categories that describe your business well. Further, ensure that your business location is entered correctly on the map to enable users to find you. Simply drag the map marker to the exact location of your business.
  • You can mention your business website(s) on the Google+ platform. This information will help websites improve search results.
  • When entering your business information on third-party platforms, make sure that you do so accurately. If there is a mistake, get it rectified directly by the webmaster.

About: This tool equips you to search the alphabetic index of the 1987 version manual by keywords, and access information for a particular SIC, division, or major group.

  • The OSHA search engine throws up pages that include all your search terms. Also, the order in which the search terms are entered will have consequences on the results.
  • You can also search for complete phrases by adding inverted commas before and after them. These words will appear together in all results exactly as you have entered them. This can come in handy when searching for names or sayings.

12. Plagiarism Checker

About: Copyscape is a tool that checks for plagiarism. When you want to identify duplicate content or verify the originality of your content, this tool can be extremely helpful.

  • Publishing content that is copied or stolen from other websites on your websites can ruin your reputation and search engine rankings. This tool can protect you from such consequences.
  • Copyscape gives you Copysentry, a tool that scan the Web for duplicate copies of your content and sends you email alerts as and when they are discovered.
  • Copyscape Premium offers advanced plagiarism detection along with other capabilities, such as copy-paste checks, batch search, private index, case tracking and an API.

About: This is another free tool that lets you find duplicate content and broken links, and explore your website to discover key issues that affect its quality and rankings.

  • Siteliner scans your website (except menus and navigation) for duplicity and pinpoints it/them on each page.
  • It also checks your websites internal links and highlights them so they can be fixed.
  • This tool identifies the pages that are most crawled by search engines based on the link patterns between your pages.
  • It also crawls and analyzes your website’s pages in an effort to provide a standard XML sitemap and detailed reports about issues that need your attention.

About: As the name suggests, Plagiarisma checks for plagiarism on the Web. It is a must-have tool for businesses looking to screen out duplicate content.

  • Use this tool to detect copyright infringements in your content in just a few minutes.
  • It is compatible with Google, Google Scholar, Google Books, Yahoo and Babylon.

Alternatives: In addition to the above, the following plagiarism-checking tools are also worth checking out –

Small SEO Tools
DupliChecker
Plagium

13. Rank Tracking

About: This tool enables you to track your business rankings and provides you with a report on ranking positions for multiple local target keywords on search engines.

  • It enables you to track your local keywords SERP rankings across more than 300 search engines.
  • You can generate reports for a plethora of websites for innumerable keywords, store historical data of your SERP rankings, create progress graphs, and generate keyword suggestions.
  • RankWatch

  • Cost: 30-day free trial, pricing starts from $29 per month

About: RankWatch is a sophisticated SEO management tool that enables users to gain insight into their digital marketing campaigns and provides them with actionable data to work on.

  • It comes with a White Label interface. Due to this, users can access ranking information as and when they want to by simply creating their login credentials.
  • This tool allows you to generate countless number of reports, which can go a long way in keeping clients happy.
  • The Keyword Archive provides you with historical data for your keywords and keeps a screenshot of the Google SERP for you to refer. This way, you can crosscheck and confirm past rankings.
  • Get precise rankings with location-based tracking for geo-specific results.
  • It will notify you of any fluctuation in your ranking position via RankWatch Email Triggers. All you need to do is set specific conditions about when you want to be notified.
  • GeoRanker

  • Cost: Free registration. Pricing starts from $99 per month

About: GeoRanker is an SERP tracking tool that uses IP-based technology to tell you how you rank for specific search terms in 2000+ cities worldwide. It can prove to be particularly helpful if you conduct businesses in multiple locations and looking to target specific markets for your offerings.

  • GeoRanker’s local rank checker can examine website ranking and tell you your exact position in real time for the targeted locations.
  • Its active keyword tracking can help you with search engine optimization and other marketing activities.
  • It helps you monitor your website rankings as a local user and identify how your website is ranking on various search engines. This should help you during the keyword prospective process.

Alternatives: You many want to check the following few tools as well in your rank tracking efforts.

SERP Scan
RankTrackr
Authority Labs
Pro Rank Tracker
SERPs
BrightLocal
Whitespark

14. Tracking Phone Number

  • Whitespark

  • Cost: Free for Whitespark users

About: Call your clients a lot? Is your business located in multiple areas? Are you running more than one business? If the answers to all these questions are in the affirmative, then this offline conversion tracker will make it easy for you to gather and track the data you gather.

  • The tool tells you exactly where customers are finding your business by generating reports. You can export these reports to CSV for use in MS Excel and other programs.
  • What’s more? If you use Google Analytics, the tool integrates your offline conversion data into it.
  • CallRail

  • Cost: 14-day free trial. Pricing starts from $30 per month

About: CallRail is one of the best tools if you want to monitor your call analytics. It lets you identify the marketing channels and campaigns that are likely to contact you. You can also use it to track online and offline phone calls from everywhere.

  • Use it to measure phone call conversions from your search and marketing campaigns, including PPC keywords.
  • The call recording feature enables you to generate leads, train your staff and improve customer service. You can also review and annotate your calls.
  • It lets you display your tracking phone number to the target audience.
  • Further, you can manage multiple companies by setting a new call-tracking number. The call flow builder helps create custom call routing for your business.

15. Social Media Management

  • Link-Assistant

  • Cost: Free registration. BuzzBundle Professional costs $199.

About: This tool lets you easily manage all your social media streams from a single platform. It lets you quickly post, respond and engage in conversations on any social network with a number of social accounts.

  • Users can create different personas and join online discussions as different people representing their business.
  • You can also create countless social accounts for each persona and easily switch between accounts.
  • You can make mass announcement to all accounts with just a click of a button. Just integrate your social accounts and publish your messages on all of them in one go.
  • Hootsuite

  • Cost: 30-day free trial. Pricing starts from $630 per month per user, billed annually

About: If you use a lot of social media in your marketing campaign, Hootsuite will help you manage all your accounts and their current and future activity.

  • Know what your audience is saying about your brand. Identify where they are and engage them with Hootsuite’s social media monitoring tools.
  • Use its social media analytics for gain a detailed overview of how your social media efforts are faring and stick to or change your current strategy accordingly.
  • It lets you include multiple team members so you can divide the workload equally among everyone.
  • Hootsuite offers secure login, profile protection and permission levels to keep your accounts details and organization’s data protected.
  • Buffer

  • Cost: 30-day free trial. Pricing starts from $10 per month.

About: Bufferapp is a social media management tool for digital marketers, that enables them to share content across various platforms.

  • It allows you to share your content at the best times throughout the day so that your followers see more updates from you and stay engaged in real time.
  • You can select which social accounts you want to post your content to and customize your message accordingly.
  • Bufferapp tracks all your important mentions and helps build a community of engaged fans.
  • Use this tool to easily add content to your queue with its browser extensions and mobile extensions and mobile apps. Schedule your content as you discover it.

Alternatives: The following social media management tools can be of tremendous help as well –

Crowdbooster
SocialOomph
TweetDeckManageFlitter

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Conclusion:

The above local SEO tools, along with their creditable alternatives, will enable and empower you to reach your local SEO objectives faster. While the list isn’t exhaustive, it does offer a targeted list of tools to put you on the road to success this year. Feel free to mention your favourite tools in the comments box. We’ll be happy to hear about them.

  • Vivek Patel is a project manager for local SEO campaigns at E2M. He has 12+ years of experience in the local search industry. He leads the Local Search division at E2M, where he oversees the workflow, project execution, marketing innovation, and client satisfaction.

    When he is not working, he enjoys staying fit, spending time with his pets, and living a healthy lifestyle. He believes that life is a matter of choice and that we should always strive to do the right thing.