Canada based Whitespark Local SEO Tools are the market leaders in providing local SEO resources to help businesses who trade primarily in their own areas to gain their share of the available online business.

Whitespark offer Local Rank Tracking with the facility to compare your performance with your local competitors which is always popular. The main attraction here, however, is the Citation Tool – Citations really are a deal buster for local businesses and a healthy citation profile will pay soon dividends in terms of better Google rankings.

For those who really don’t have the time to build a Citation profile for themselves Whitespark offer a “done for you” service which is reasonably priced and sure to appeal to many small businesses.

Pricing is a bit tricky and I think they’ve made it unecessarily complicated. Basically, you can have a free account with very limited scope, for the Local Citation Finder but the Local Rank Tracking tool does not have a free account option – the starter plan is only $5 though so you can give it a good try for not much money.

I can’t help comparing Whitespark to the other major player, BrightLocal, who are based just down the road from me in Lewes, Sussex and who offer a cleaner account structure and, in my opinion, a much better set of local SEO tools. To top it off they offer a full 30 days no nonsense trial with no attempt to get your credit card details – I’d have to recommend them above Whitespark for that reason alone, even if their tools were not superior – which they are as far as I’m concerned – and I’ve used them both.

Building a solid Citation profile is very important for local businesses and, whichever tool you choose, (MOZ is also worth a look), you will see improvements quite soon after you add more quality citations to your website.

Whitespark’s pricing is very reasonable and, apart from the starter plan for $5/month, there are a range of others with bigger data allowances, all of which makes them well worth a look – it’s just a shame you can’t get a proper free trial.