Most advice on “how to use AI for local SEO” faceplants in at least one of three ways:
- The problem isn’t a problem you’ve got.
- The solution is too complicated or hard to digest.
- You can do it better yourself, perhaps the old-fashioned way.
Even so, your local SEO campaign is a lot of work, and you just know AI can help lighten your lift. What are some specific, practical, high-payoff local SEO tasks AI tools can help you with, starting right now?
1. The quick competitive backlinks check. Go to your AI chatbot of choice (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc) and type in “what domains link to [URL of competitor’s website]?”. You’ll see where they’ve got their most-prominent backlinks, plus some. Will this show you as many links as a paid backlink checker will? No, but even when you use one (I like Ahrefs) generally you’re trying to find the most authoritative or relevant sites anyway. Going straight to an AI chatbot is a nice cheap way to see generally where a given competitor has planted the flag – and where you might want to do so.
2. The street address triage. Ask your AI buddy “what kind of address is [street address]” or “what kind of address is [name of business] located at”. This will tell you whether your competitor is probably spamming or probably not violating the Google Business Profile page guidelines, which in turn tells you whether and how you might be able to get Google to remedy that Your AI chatbot of choice should even tell you whether your competitor is at a UPS store address or similar party-foul address.
3. Use Arvow or a similar tool to generate images that you can optimize and put on critical pages on your site. Arvow’s free AI image-generator tool is an awesome way to generate images that you can use for free, without needing to spend time searching high and low for almost the right image, and without fear of an accidental copyright violation. Play around with the generator until it spits out a relevant image you like, and then optimize the bejeebers out that photo as per my SOPs.
4. Create a transcript of a YouTube video with NoteGPT or a similar tool. Not sure what you should put in the “description” field of your YouTube video? Want some quick, relevant content to paste onto on a “watch” page or other page you created specifically to house the video? Easy money. This AI tool will give you the transcript in seconds. Just be sure to proofread it for typos, because YouTube’s built-in captioning or someone’s accent might garble certain words (as in “sophets” rather than “soffits”).
5. Various citation-auditing tasks. A quick inventory of your non-Google local listings (Yelp, YP, BBB, etc.) typically is something you’d do for your own business, but it can also be useful if you want to sniff out where a specific competitor has online listings and maybe some reviews. An easy way to pull up the major listings is to type in something like “show me the key online listings of [name of business] in [location of business]”.
You can also search for something like “all phone numbers used by [name of business]” or “all former names or DBAs of [business]” or “what is the real business name of [name of business]”. Then you simply Google those old names and old or alternate phone numbers and see which citation sources show up. If you’re snooping on a competitor’s business, that intel may also help you determine whether the name is legit or a spammy DBA that you might be able to get fixed.
6. A deep website scour for variations on a specific search term. This is a more-robust version of what search operators used pull up in Google. For example, let’s say you’ve got a site with hundreds or thousands of pages, and you want to update your hourly rates on all of the pages where you mention your rates, but some of them mention $150/hour and others mention $175/hour. Type in something like “on which URLs on [URL of website] is the hourly rate mentioned?”. Your AI chatbot should up a list of specific pages one hourly rate or another is listed, at which point you can update those pages without needing to dig deeper. You can also do a version of this if you need to update your business hours, or your policy on free estimates, or your service area, old Schema markup, etc.
7. Create a list of communities you serve based on specific criteria, like county, region, population, distance from your HQ, etc. As I tell people constantly and may even have told you in the past, in most cases it’s extremely beneficial for SEO to put a near-exhaustive list of the communities your serve all over your site. That list usually should go in the footer and in a prominent spot on each of your “money” pages (homepage, service pages, city pages, etc.). Can you create that list yourself? Probably, but having your pet AI bot drag it into the house is quicker.
8. Figure out which citation sources offer followed backlinks. These are simply directories (general, local, or industry-specific) where you can list your business and get a good or not-terrible link out of the deal. I suggest pulling up Google’s AI Mode and searching for “which [industry] directories offer dofollow backlinks.” (Or something similar. Yes, “dofollow” technically is a misnomer, but at least the AI will get your meaning.) Your AI gofer will still probably mix in some unhelpful results, like of directories that stick nofollow on all of their links, but you’ll still have saved yourself some elbow grease.
9. Extract a list of customers’ email addresses for a Yelp “Find Friends” lookup. Seeing which of your customers are active Yelp reviewers is the best way to give those customers an oblique or hard nudge that you’d really appreciate a review somewhere (maybe, just maybe, on Yelp). The problem is that your list of customers’ contact info is probably a hot mess. Even if it’s on a spreadsheet, the email addresses are probably concatenated with names and other info. In that case your designated “review outreach person” will probably spend more time picking email addresses out of your spreadsheet than on contacting would-be reviewers, so the latter will never get done. If you upload a spreadsheet with just one column, ChatGTP or a similar AI chatbot can very easily separate the email addresses out, allowing you to look up a cool 100 customers a day in Yelp’s “Find Friends” feature. Then you can finally contact a few strategic customers and maybe get a couple of Yelp reviews of this joint.
10. Extract page topics that a competitor’s site covers and that your site does not cover. Go to AI Mode and type in “which pages does [competitor’s URL] have that [your URL] does not have?” or something similar. You can also see content gaps between your YouTube channel and a competitor’s. Type in something like “what video topics does [name or URL of competitor’s YouTube channel] cover that [name or URL of your YouTube channel]l does not cover?” You’ll get a high-level comparison. That will give you some good ideas and some…ideas.
Most business owners, marketers, and SEOs see the promise of AI only in terms of showing up in the AI search results, and don’t think as much about how to use AI to do the things that help them to rank. You can apply a few of the recommendations above to accomplish both.
I am certain I missed a lot of local SEO tasks that AI can help with. How have you found it to be handy? What’s something you’ve tried to do that hasn’t really helped you with yet? Leave a comment!
