If Local SEO is a focus for your business, you’ve probably heard about Local Viking, a platform designed to streamline and enhance your Google My Business (GMB) experience and results. While the platform has garnered a positive reputation for GMB management made simple and has a lot of fans in the Local SEO industry.
At SerpFocus, we do use Local Viking, so in this review, I’ll give you my honest opinion about the platform, and then you can decide if it’s the right fit for you and your company. I’ve given Local Viking a 4.5/5 rating overall, so let me start by breaking down my reasons:
Local Viking is a very competitively priced platform—especially when compared with competitors such as Local Falcon. It provides access to all of its features for its Single $20/month plan, which should be more than enough for business owners managing just one location.
If you’re an agency or business owner with multiple locations, Local Viking offers a range of plans that scale up to 70+ locations. It’s one of the most reasonably priced platforms in the industry, and I’m comfortable standing by my 5/5 rating.
Accuracy can be measured from a couple of different perspectives. When it comes to metrics, Local Viking is quite strong. The platform provides reliable local SEO data, especially if you’re focused on geo-based rank tracking. No complaints there.
Where Local Viking’s accuracy falls short, though, is in terms of glitches. To be perfectly honest, there are times when the program just glitches out and shows no rankings at all. At these times, you have to re-run it, which can get frustrating pretty quickly. Hopefully, Local Viking is working on a solution to this problem, but for now, I find it a big enough issue to significantly lower my rating.
Most of Local Vikings’ features are pretty much what you’d expect—which doesn’t mean they’re bad. In fact, most of the features are done very well.
There are a few stand-out features, such as the Geogrid Rank Tracker, that we’ll explore in more detail later on in this review. But overall, the features are solid and useful, though not groundbreaking or game-changing. I imagine that Local Viking will continue to tweak and expand its features as they evolve over time, but for now, I’ll give it a solid 4/5 in this area.
Local Viking is a GMB management software that’s designed to improve rankings for local business owners. Founded by Mark Luckenbaugh in 2018, it has quickly become a go-to solution for agencies and businesses in the Local SEO industry.
Because the team behind Local Viking is made up of hands-on SEO professionals, the platform has been praised for being accurately informed by everyday needs in the trenches.
Many reviewers, including me, feel that Local Viking is a timely and relevant software solution for GMB management and Local SEO. It’s also a highly accessible platform, with a Facebook group that has over 28,000 members.
From a single dashboard, Local Viking schedules GMB posts, tracks local pack rankings, optimizes photo uploads, provides review management tools, plus much more. When used effectively, it’s a powerful tool that can really help you build and maintain a solid online presence.
If you’re new to the world of Local SEO, you might be wondering what exactly GMB is. Let’s take a moment to understand it:
Google My Business (GMB) is a free Local SEO tool that allows you to manage your local search presence in Google Maps and local search engines. In GMB, you can upload details about your business, including hours of operation, location, and a description of what makes your business unique or special. In addition, you can use GMB to make timely posts about special offers, promotions, events, and products.
Effective GMB management can help your business to get found in local search engines. It’s an important aspect of search engine optimization for local business owners and, when done right, can also help your business appear in the top search results on Google Maps (known as local pack rankings). In today’s world, understanding and managing your GMB is critical to helping your business succeed.
Every platform has pros and cons. In the following lists, I’ve tried to give an honest snapshot of my own experience with Local Viking:
Alright, let’s get down to it. What can Local Viking actually do for you? Here’s an overview of what I consider to be the platform’s most important features:
The Geogrid Rank Tracker is a stand-out Local Viking feature that makes it possible for you to view GMB keyword rankings on a map-based visualization that functions within a set physical radius.
This feature is far superior to standard rank trackers for GMBs because it gives you a bird’s eye view at multiple scan points to accurately represent search results from your exact pin location. Ultimately, the Geogrid Rank Tracker provides valuable information about how to increase your local rankings.
Local Viking’s dashboard provides a tool for managing and responding to Google Reviews. Review notifications can be sent directly to your phone or email, which makes them much easier to keep track of.
Local Viking’s rank tracker provides tools for managing and tracking your keywords, including local rankings, organic rankings, location-based targeting, and both desktop and mobile tracking. Overall, I’ve found this feature to be strong, straightforward, and reliable.
This feature makes it possible to schedule a Google post in advance (something you can’t do directly from your GMB account). If you’re only managing one or two locations, this may not sound like a big deal, but if you’ve got multiple locations, it’s a game changer.
You can also create bulk postings for multiple locations and even create recurring posts (successful posts that Local Viking will update with new dates and re-post over and over again to look new).
Image uploads can have a major impact on your GMB rankings, but they can take a lot of time and energy to upload on a regular basis. With Local Viking, you can schedule photo uploads in advance and dramatically reduce your workload in this area. You can also geotag your photos quickly and efficiently, which can also be beneficial for your rankings.
It might surprise you to know that any member of the public can suggest an edit to a GMB listing. Unfortunately, people have been known to abuse this power by inserting inaccurate information into their competitors’ listings. Local Viking helps you avoid this sort of below-the-belt activity with its Attribute Locking feature, which protects your information from unwanted tampering. One of my favorite features on the platform!
As I mentioned at the start of this review, I feel that Local Viking’s pricing plans are very competitive and offer a lot of bang for your buck. Every plan offers unlimited GMB posts, and you can also attach unlimited Google accounts on all except the Single plan.
Local Viking offers 5 pricing plans to choose from, ranging from $20-$149 per month. The Single plan allows you to manage just one Google My Business listing, while the Starter lets you manage 10. With the Pro plan, you get 20, 40 with the Agency plan, and 70 at the Enterprise level. If you have more than 70 locations, you can contact Local Viking directly for special pricing.
Considering that Local Viking’s main competitor, Local Falcon, charges for each geogrid lookup (which can get very pricey very quickly), I think that Local Viking’s pricing is quite reasonable. Also worth noting is that Local Viking retains all of your dashboard data even if you cancel your plan. If you change your mind and want to re-subscribe, you can pick up right where you left off.
In my opinion, Local Viking is good for anyone who is currently managing one or more GMB accounts. The more accounts you manage, the more time you’ll save by subscribing to Local Viking.
Local Viking has good accuracy when it comes to its metrics and reporting; you can safely trust the statistics you’re receiving, especially from the Geogrid Rank Tracker. As I’ve mentioned a few times in this review, though, the program is glitchy, and sometimes you need to re-run it in order to get the information you’re looking for. In this respect, Local Viking is sometimes not accurate at all.
Yes, there are. While Local Viking is probably my favorite option in the GMB and review management space (simply because it’s relatively comprehensive and reasonably priced), competitors such as Local Falcon and OneUp are also viable alternatives.
Local Falcon is similar to Local Viking in that they both have dashboards and reporting, social media, and reputation management to improve local SEO rankings. Local Viking’s auto-posting feature for images is missing from Local Falcon, and Local Falcon charges a fee for each geogrid lookup. That being said, there are many in the SEO industry who stand by Local Falcon.
OneUp is a platform that overlaps with Local Viking when it comes to scheduling and managing social media and GMB posts to boost growth and traffic. It has a free plan, and its paid plans begin at just $6 per month. But then again, it doesn’t offer nearly the same breadth of features as Local Viking. It all boils down to your own needs as a business owner.
For more honest reviews of software or to learn more about the SEO industry, get in touch with us at SerpFocus today!
For the past decade I've been building businesses and using SEO to rank them in top positions. For the last 5 years I've worked at a premier search engine marketing agency where it's my job to stay on up-to-date with the latest SEO developments and implement SEO strategies for my clients. Read my full bio here.
