Local SEO Toolkit

Audit any local business in five minutes — listing, rankings, reviews, citations, growth plan

Paste a business name. Get a full local-search health report: how the Google listing looks, where it ranks on the map pack across a geo-grid, what recent reviews are saying, which directory citations are missing, whether the landing page is technically sound, and a 90-day plan to fix what matters. Report-only, standalone, no Google Business Profile connection required.

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Standalone — no Google account connection. · Updated August 5, 2026

Bright Smiles Dental — Austin, TX 4.7 ★ · 218 reviews · Category: Dentist

Audited

Overview

Map Rankings

Reviews AI

Citations

Local Audit

Research

Growth Plan

Map-pack rank grid — "dentist near me"

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Avg 4.2 · 5×5 grid ↑ 1.1 vs last month

★★★★★ 2d ago

"Dr. Chen fit me in same day. Painless cleaning."

AI reply drafted

★★☆☆☆ 5d ago

"Front desk kept me on hold for 15 minutes…"

Recurring topic · wait time

No Google connection

5×5 / 7×7 Geo Grid

AI Review Replies

90-Day Growth Plan

What is local SEO, and what does a toolkit for it do?

Local SEO is the discipline of making a location-based business visible when a nearby customer searches for what it sells. The signals Google actually uses are narrow: the Google Business Profile (name, address, phone, category, hours, reviews), citations in trusted directories, on-page relevance of the landing page, backlinks pointing at that landing page, and proximity of the searcher to the storefront.

A local SEO toolkit is a single workspace that answers the recurring questions across all of those signals: does my listing look right, where do I rank on the map pack, what are recent reviews saying, which directories am I missing from, is my landing page technically sound, and what should I fix next. SignalSumo's toolkit does that per location — one project per store, per office, per service area — and generates a 90-day plan every time you audit.

Key Takeaways

Seven tabs per location: Overview, Rankings (geo-grid), Reviews, Citations, Audit, Research, Growth Plan.
Standalone — the toolkit never asks for Google Business Profile write access, so you can audit any business the moment you paste its name.
Map-pack rankings are collected across a 5×5 or 7×7 geo-grid, not a single point — the true measure of local visibility.
Reviews are grouped by sentiment and recurring topic; AI reply drafts are generated in one click, tone-matched to the review.
Citation gap check surfaces missing directories, NAP mismatches and competitor-only listings; a prioritized list to fix manually or hand to a citation service.
The 90-day growth plan is auto-generated from every issue detected, ordered by expected impact.
Report-only by design: nothing is written back to Google — the toolkit tells you what to fix, you fix it in the source.

The way it usually gets done

Auditing a local business is death by ten tabs

Every question about the listing lives in a different tool, in a different tab, and the answers age out faster than you can compare them.

Google Maps for rankings

Type the keyword from your office postcode. Get one position. Learn nothing about how you rank in the neighbourhood two suburbs over — where the customers actually are.

Spreadsheets for citations

A tab per directory, a copy-paste per row, and you still don't know which listings a competitor has and you don't.

Guessing at reviews

You know the star average. You don't know the recurring complaint that's dragging it down, or which reviews are still waiting on a reply.

No plan, just a pile

Ten open tabs, no priority order, no "do this Monday, this Tuesday." The audit ends and nothing changes.

One workspace per location

Seven tabs, one project per location

Every recurring local-SEO question lives on its own tab, sourced from real data, timestamped and refreshable on demand.

Overview

Listing snapshot plus every top-line stat: rating, review count, average grid rank, citation coverage, audit health score. Trend chips show what moved since the last refresh; every card carries its own timestamp.

Map Rankings — geo-grid

Run any tracked keyword across a matrix of points around the storefront. Four density tiers: 5-point cross (always free), 3×3, 5×5, or 7×7 — priced in credits at 1:2:4 so you only pay for the coverage you actually want. Focused per-keyword view opens a full-screen heatmap with 1-3 / 4-10 / 11-20 / 21+ coverage bands.

Reviews AI

Timeline of every public review, grouped by sentiment and star rating. Recurring topics surfaced automatically (wait time, staff, price). One-click AI reply drafts — tone-matched, editable, quota-bounded per plan — you post them manually to Google.

Citations

Directory scan across Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places, and industry-specific sites. Missing, mismatched-NAP, or competitor-only — every citation gap in one prioritized list, direct links to each directory's submission form.

Local Audit — landing page

Our own crawler fetches the URL linked from the listing (no third-party dependency): Core Web Vitals, structured data, mobile usability, local business schema, NAP consistency in HTML, robots and sitemap health. Every issue with a specific fix and priority.

Research

Local keyword discovery — variants of "near me," service+city, category+neighbourhood — with real search volume, difficulty and CPC. Service-area analysis reveals which neighbourhoods actually drive traffic and which are still opportunities.

Growth Plan — grouped by effort

Every issue from the six tabs above, sorted by expected impact and bucketed into quick-wins (under an hour), planned tasks (a week), and strategic bets (a month). The plan regenerates every time you re-audit — check items off, watch the list collapse.

Report-only, by design

The toolkit never writes to your Google listing. You get the diagnosis and the fix; you apply it in Google, in the citation directory, or on your site. Works on any business — yours, a prospect's, a competitor's — with no OAuth dance.

Beyond the tabs

Cross-cutting capabilities every project inherits

Things that don't fit inside one tab because they apply to all of them — automation, alerts, exports, quotas.

Heatmap density, credit-priced

The 5-point cross is always free. Denser scans burn credits at a 1:2:4 ratio: 3×3 = 1 credit, 5×5 = 2 credits, 7×7 = 4 credits. Pay for coverage only when you need it.

Weekly auto-refresh (paid plans)

Grid, reviews and listing details refresh up to weekly on Mid, Pro and Agency plans — gated by staleness, recent activity and per-location cooldown so real usage stays sane. On-demand refresh is always available.

Bell alerts + email digests

New reviews, rank shifts, listing edits, audit-score changes — surfaced in the notification bell and rolled into a weekly digest email so you notice movement without opening the app.

White-label PDF export

Export any location's full audit as a branded PDF — your logo, your colours, your domain. Agency-ready. Available on Pro and Agency plans; the free preview watermarks the export.

One project per location

Every physical location gets its own isolated project — separate grid, separate reviews, separate audit. Switch locations from the sidebar; the tab set stays identical so muscle memory carries over.

Timestamped, timeline-first

Every card shows exactly when the number was last pulled. Every metric has a history modal — see the rank timeline, review volume trend, or citation completeness over the last months, capped by plan.

Five steps

From a business name to a growth plan in five minutes

Look up the business

Paste the business name into the Google Places picker. We resolve it to a real place_id and pull the full listing — address, phone, category, hours, rating, review count.

Confirm the location

Verify the pin, address and category are correct, pick a country and market, and save. Nothing is written back to Google — the confirmation card is for you.

Run a first audit

The toolkit fetches your website, checks map-pack rankings across a geo-grid, pulls the last 90 days of reviews, scans citation directories and runs an on-page audit on the linked landing page.

Read the growth plan

The auto-generated 90-day plan bundles every issue by priority — with the expected impact on ranking, reviews, citations and technical health.

Act on the checklist

Fix items in Google, in each citation directory, or on your site. Re-audit anytime; the timeline in each tab shows exactly what changed since the last run.

Who the toolkit is built for

If the business earns money because a customer walks in the door — or drives to a service area — this is the workflow.

Multi-location operators

One project per store. Compare grid rankings, review sentiment and citation completeness across every location on a single dashboard — spot the outliers.

Local SEO agencies

Audit a prospect's listing live in a sales meeting. Export the growth plan as a proposal. Every re-audit becomes a monthly retainer deliverable.

Owner-operators

The same visibility a $500/month agency retainer buys — self-serve. The checklist tells you exactly what to do this week.

How the audit is sourced

Where the numbers actually come from

Every card carries the timestamp of the last successful pull, so you always know how fresh a number is. We don't fabricate averages or fill blanks with placeholder data — if a signal isn't sourced, the tab says so.

Listing data — resolved through Google Places, then enriched via enterprise-grade SERP infrastructure (place details, category, hours, rating, review count, photos).
Rankings — real map-pack SERP queries executed from each grid point, not synthesized from proxy signals.
Reviews — the public review stream tied to the listing's place ID, deduplicated across syncs.
Citations — direct checks against each directory, not a third-party aggregator.
Landing page audit — our own crawler fetches the URL and runs the checks locally.

The honest tradeoff

Because the toolkit never asks for Google Business Profile write access, we cannot fix your listing for you. We surface exactly what's wrong and where to change it — you apply the fix in Google itself.

This tradeoff is deliberate: it means the toolkit works on any business — yours, a prospect's, a competitor's — without a per-listing OAuth dance. Report-only, on purpose.

Included in every SignalSumo paid plan

Locations, tracked keywords, geo-grid pins and monthly audits scale with plan tier. Free-plan users get a single preview audit — unsaved — to see the format before signing up.

See plans

Frequently asked questions

Everything the toolkit does — and, honestly, what it doesn't.

A local SEO toolkit is a single workspace that answers every recurring question a location-based business asks about its online presence: does my Google listing look right, where do I rank on the map when someone searches nearby, what are people saying in reviews, where are my competitors listed that I am not, is my landing page technically sound, and what should I do next. SignalSumo's toolkit bundles a listing lookup, a geo-grid rank tracker, review monitoring with AI reply drafts, a citation gap check, an on-page audit and an auto-generated 90-day growth plan into one project per location.

No. The toolkit is intentionally standalone — it never asks for Google Business Profile write access and never modifies your listing. It reads public listing data through enterprise-grade SERP infrastructure, so you can audit any location — yours or a prospect's — the moment you paste its name. If you do want in-product listing edits, a separate module is available; the toolkit itself stays report-only.

On a normal rank tracker you get one position per keyword. On a geo-grid, we run the same search from a matrix of points around the business — typically 5×5 or 7×7 — and record the map-pack position at each pin. The result is a heatmap that shows exactly where you rank #1, where you fall out of the pack, and how far from the storefront your visibility collapses. For a location-based business, average rank across a grid is a much better signal than a single ranking taken from the office postcode.

A 5-point cross scan is always free — one query per compass direction plus the centre point, no credits burned. Denser scans cost credits at a 1:2:4 ratio: a 3×3 grid is 1 credit, a 5×5 is 2 credits, a 7×7 is 4 credits. You pick the density each time you scan, so a routine check stays free and only a "prove the impact of this month's work" run costs anything. Every credit-priced scan shows the cost before you confirm.

Yes — Pro and Agency plans include white-label PDF export. Every location's full audit (rankings, reviews, citations, on-page audit, growth plan) exports to a PDF branded with your logo, colours and domain, ready to send to a client. Free-plan previews export with a SignalSumo watermark so the format is visible before you upgrade.

The toolkit pulls the location's public review stream, tracks new reviews as they arrive, groups them by sentiment and star rating, and surfaces the recurring topics customers raise (service speed, staff friendliness, pricing, cleanliness). For any review you can generate an AI reply draft in one click — tone-matched, personalized to the review body, editable before you post it manually to Google.

We scan the directories a location-based business is expected to appear in — Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places, industry-specific sites — and report where you're missing, where the NAP (name / address / phone) doesn't match your Google listing, and where a competitor is present but you are not. You get a prioritized list; you fix the listings manually in each directory (or hand the list to a citation-building service).

Yes. /local-seo is the marketing overview of our full local-search suite. The toolkit at /local-seo-toolkit is one tool inside that suite — specifically the standalone audit-and-report workflow that requires nothing more than a Google Places name to get started. If you're looking to connect a real Google Business Profile and manage posts / photos / Q&A from inside SignalSumo, that's the /local module.

Included in every SignalSumo paid plan; the number of locations, keywords, geo-grid pins and audits per month scales with plan tier. Free-plan users get a single preview audit (unsaved) so they can see the format before signing up.

Listing details, reviews and citations are re-checked every time you open a location's tab (or click Refresh). Rank grids and site audits are on-demand — they cost a real SERP query, so we run them when you ask, not on a silent schedule. Every card carries the timestamp of the last successful pull.

Multi-location operators who need a single dashboard per location; agencies who audit a prospect's local presence in a sales meeting; solo owners who want the same visibility a $500/month agency retainer buys, self-serve. If the business earns money because customers walk in the door — or drive to a service area — this is the workflow.