If you are a small business or agency you know the importance of Google My Business and local…
If you are a small business or agency you know the importance of Google My Business and local seo. If you own or manage a GMB you know how difficult it is to manage the listing and do updates.
If you are managing 5 or more GMB listings it can be a full-time job. Well, luckily there is software that has been a game changer for anyone that has a Google My Business account.
Local Viking will help you save time, and if you are managing multiple GMB listings the word leverage comes to mind.
But is Local Viking right for you?
To help you answer that question, this Local Viking review will cover every aspect of the software from their Geogrid, photo posting, rank tracking, listing management, white label reporting, support and more.
Let’s Get Started.
What is Local Viking?
Local Viking is everything you wished Google would offer to their Google My Business platform to make managing your listing easier.
The team behind Local Viking are in the trenches everyday actually doing local seo for clients. So the Local Viking team
knows the pain points in this space and has solved a lot of problems for small business owners and agencies.
The platform is designed to make managing your GMB listing a lot easier and help you get to the top 3 spots in the Google Maps section.
A Brief Overview of Local Viking
Local Viking is an American software company based in Hanover Pennsylvania.
The company started in 2018 and has become one of the most popular goto SEO tools for local SEO agencies and businesses.
The company is run by Mark Luckenbaugh. His team’s focus is local SEO and they have had a lot of success ranking businesses and helping them get new clients and customers.
This software was built by local SEO pros that are in the trenches day in and day out.
They know exactly what the industry needs to succeed because they do local SEO every day.
The company is super accessible with a Facebook Group with over 28,000 members.
The Local Viking team and FB members are in the group answering local SEO questions every day.
Local Viking Features Overview
Local Viking provides a host of needed local SEO tools that are missing from the market that helps agencies and small businesses.
Here’s a list of the tools:
- GMB Geogrid
- Google My Business posting
- Review Management
- Rank Tracking
- Listing Management
- GMB Photo posting
- Q&A on Google My Business
- Lock GMB Edits
- White Label Reporting
Local Viking Pricing Plans.
If you only have one location, then the single 20-dollar-a-month plan will probably be just fine. However, if you are an agency or multiple location business owners you are gonna want to check out the other plans.
You have 5 plans to choose from:
- Single – $20 per month
- Starter – $39 per month
- Pro – $69 per month
- Agency – $99 per month
- Enterprise – $149 per month
Every plan offers unlimited Google My Business Posts and you can attach unlimited Google accounts as well on all plans except the first plan single.
With the Starter plan you can manage 10 Google My Business listings. The pro plan lets you manage 20.
The agency plan lets you manage 40 and the Enterprise lets you manage 70 Google My business listings.
If you have more than 70 locations you can contact Local Viking for special pricing.
Best Features of Local Viking
Ok, now we are going to get into why Local Viking is one of the top software to help you manage your Google My Business listing.
Here are the 9 features that make Local Viking stand above its competitors:
1. GMB GeoGrid
I personally remember when Local Viking came out with the GeoGrid.
The GeoGrid was such a game changer and a totally new way of checking your rankings.
Every Local SEO knows that rankings are different for each business across a city, but there was never a tool to show clients this so easily.
This literally stopped phone calls from clients calling about their ranking in parts of towns. When I worked for a Fortune 500 digital marketing firm we would literally have conference calls explaining
why would a client’s business rank well when he was in the office and then he would drive home 4 miles and his ranking would be lower?
The Geogrid will also help you retain clients. If you show your client there is still room for improvement they will stick with you.
When you click on the grid each node will pop out and you get even more granular information on where you are ranking in that specific area in the city.
You can also download these reports and send them to your clients in a pdf if you like. You can also create a timelapse report like the gif above to show how your local SEO campaign has performed over time.
Local Viking’s GeoGrid is the best in the industry.
2. Google My Business Posting
If you have ever used the Google Post feature in your GMB account you know how powerful it is to get traffic and new leads for your business.
Unfortunately, you can’t schedule Google Post in advance. If you want a Google Post to run on a certain day you actually need to go in that day and post it.
This isn’t a big deal if you are managing one or two locations but if you are managing 10 or more locations it can be crazy on post-day.
I was posting on the first of the month to over 100 Google My Business locations manually.
Yes, it was a drag. So being able to automate posts and do a handful of locations a day was great.
Local Viking’s GMB gets better because you can do bulk posting. You can upload posts with a CSV file or directly in the local Viking dashboard.
What usually took me a couple of hours now takes minutes.
Another great feature I found is the recurring posts feature. A lot of businesses run the same Google Posts all the time.
With Local Viking, you can set up your posts to rerun. This changes the date on your posts and makes it look new.
Local Viking is worth its weight in gold with this feature alone.
3. Review Management
As an agency, speed and leveraging your time is everything. With Local Viking you can do that with their review management tool.
If one of your services is responding to reviews for your clients you can do that right inside Local Viking’s platform.
Now you don’t have to jump back and forth between GMB accounts to respond to reviews. You can do it all here under Local Viking.
4. Rank Tracking
Local Viking’s rank tracker is leading the industry. It has all the features you would need to manage and track your keywords.
Here are the features:
- Track Local Rankings
- Track Organic Rankings
- Location Based Targeting
- Manual Spot Check
- Mobile & Desktop Tracking
Local Viking’s rank tracker works on a credit system. Their starter plan starts you off with 1600 credits. That is enough if you only have local business to manage.
Local Viking’s Historical Grid is great to show clients over time how their campaign has performed. With the Historical Grid you can really show the progression of your Local SEO campaign.
5. Listing Management
Imagine never logging into Google My Business again. That is what Local Viking is really offering with their software.
You can manage all your locations in one central location and get things done faster if you are running an agency.
If you have 1 location or 200 it doesn’t matter. Local Viking will help you get things done faster and automate the most mundane stuff you used to have to do manually with Google My business.
6. GMB Photo Posting
Uploading photos to your Google My Business listing can be someone’s job in itself.
Google loves photos and it’s important to consistently add photos to your listing as much as possible.
With Local Viking, this is possible because their software can schedule photo posts.
You can schedule a month of photos to be uploaded in a couple of clicks. It is truly remarkable.
But what about geotagging photos? This fight will never end in the local search engine optimization community.
A lot of SEO’s have given up geotagging photos before uploading. We still geotag photos here at Learn Local SEO. We believe it works and so does Local Viking.
Even if you don’t believe in geotagging photos it is too easy not to with Local Viking.
Local Viking sends your pictures through Google’s API directly to your GMB account with all your EXIF metadata intact.
It doesn’t get any better than this. With Local Viking, you add EXIF metadata to hundreds of pictures at once and schedule them out.
It is truly that easy. So whether you believe in geotagging photos or not you should because with Local Viking you can do it in minutes.
7. Q&A on Google My Business
Questions and answers are probably the most underutilized tool on Google My Business.
If you are managing a Google My Business account you should populate with questions and answers for your potential customers.
Before Local Viking, it was a difficult task to add questions and answers to your Google My Business listing.
First, you could only do this on your mobile phone and you had to log in and out of accounts to ask a question and then log back into the GMB account to answer.
It was a pain, to say the least. With Local Viking, you can upload all your questions and answers for your customers onto the Local Viking Dashboard.
Once again Local Viking will save you hours with this feature alone.
8. Lock GMB Edits
Believe it or not anybody can suggest and edit to your Google My Business listing.
This is a real problem in some business verticals where competitors try to change your phone number address etc.
Local Viking has solved this problem by locking your GMB listing. Inside the Local Viking platform you can lock your listing.
If someone suggests an edit Local Viking will automatically change the listing back to what you originally had it.
This saves you countless hours of checking listings and changing things back.
If you have to manage a lot of listings you know the constant struggle of fighting these edits.
With Local Viking, you can rest easy and know your listing will stay exactly how you filled it out.
9. White Label Reporting
White Label is crucial for any business working with clients. With Local Viking, you can have a complete white label solution even the email that it is sent from.
The report is so flexible as well. You can basically put whatever metric you want on the report and leave off whatever you want.
With most companies, you can’t do this. Also, you schedule these reports to run automatically whether you need to send your
client’s a report weekly or monthly, with Local Viking can do it.
Local Viking Cons
- No Data Aggregator service (Local Viking another company offers citations services.)
- No full review management system to get reviews.(Local Viking lets you integrate with rep.co to get reviews from customers on autopilot.)
- Pricing can be confusing in the beginning.
Local Viking Review Summary
Hopefully, after reading this article you can see the power of Local Viking and why a lot of small businesses and agencies use the software to manage their GMB listings.
The company is all in on Local SEO and is always updating the software when new things come out for Google My Business.
If you are a business or an agency I would highly recommend you give Local Viking a try.
You will easily see how much time you will save with each account. This will save you money on new hires and streamline your local search campaigns.
Get started with Local Viking today.
