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Posted by David-Mihm

One of the many things that appealed to me about joining forces with Moz 18 months ago was the empathy that every Mozzer has for business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search. Although it’s generally thought of as less competitive than a lot of other disciplines (like news, video, or e-commerce SEO), the prerequisite set of tasks for success in local search continues to grow.

In the shift from desktop to mobile, local search is fragmenting more than ever, and business listings are an increasingly critical foundation. NAP consistency (establishing a canonical Name, Address, and Phone Number for your business location) is one of the top local search ranking factors every year. Establishing a consistent NAP is vital to ranking in local results. All the link building and social media in the world won’t help a business if Google can’t trust its information, and customers can’t reach it.

Whether you’re a small agency trying to serve dozens of mom-and-pops on a limited budget, or a large brand manager tasked with managing listings for hundreds of stores, the time it takes to ensure the accuracy and visibility of business information is overwhelming. Let alone the time it takes to correct errors, align categories, deal with PIN or postcard verifications, or add missing listings. And it’s often prohibitively expensive.

So as we thought about how to evolve GetListed’s original product, we decided to start by helping solve the fundamental pain point of local search: ensuring accurate, consistent business listing information on the most important sites on the web.

What does Moz Local do?

For a high-level overview, check out this video:

Our goal is to make Moz Local the most efficient option for location management, with an easy-to-use interface and an affordable price point.

In a nutshell, Moz Local allows you to upload a spreadsheet of all of your locations, which we then standardize and distribute to all five major U.S. data aggregators:

• Infogroup
• Neustar Localeze
• Acxiom
• Factual
• Foursquare

and three important local directories:

• Superpages
• eLocal
• Best of the Web Local

for $49/year per location.

After submitting your locations, we provide you with full reporting about the status of each listing (with links to those listings live on the web, where available). We’ll also surface possible duplicate listings we discover across the ecosystem, provide you with the fastest path to correcting or closing those duplicates, and notify you of any unauthorized changes to your NAP that we come across in our local web crawl.

To dive into the product, visit Moz.com/local and download our CSV template. If you currently manage your locations at Google Places, though, you can get a head start by simply uploading that spreadsheet to Moz Local (we accept all the same field names and categories). Full documentation for the product is available here, and FAQs and a deeper description of how the product works are here.

Key features

Upgraded Listing Details page (free to all Moz Community members)

The original single-location lookup functionality from GetListed is still available at moz.com/local/search—and you can also access these Listing Details from your Moz Local dashboard. As part of the Moz Local changeover, we’ve upgraded it with a much snazzier results page and a quicker visual indication of how a business is doing and where you should focus your efforts.

Category Research Tool (free to all Moz Community members)

One of my persistent headaches back when I was a full-time local search consultant was performing category searches for slight wording variations as I was submitting listings across every single local search site.

With that in mind, we designed the Moz Local Category Research Tool to be a huge time- and energy-saver. Start typing the keywords or industry your business is in, and we’ll start refining the list of categories right before your eyes. Selecting a category will then show you how it maps to different search engines or directories when we publish your listing.

If there’s a more specific category on a particular search engine that you’d rather submit for a given listing, simply add it to the Category Overrides field in your CSV spreadsheet.

Duplicate listing notifications

As I mentioned above, we provide reporting on possible duplicate listings in the ecosystem, and where possible, we present you a direct path to closing them. Right now you’ll see a relatively tight set of possible duplicates, but going forward you’ll see a wider possible set to help you clean up old addresses, changed business names, or unwanted tracking phone numbers.

Expanded Learning Center (free to all Moz Community members)

Huge thanks to Miriam Ellis for her assistance in compiling, updating, and editing this greatly expanded version of the GetListed Learning Center. We now offer 41 pages full of local marketing background and best practices. The top pages from the original Learning Center like the local search glossary, marketing priority questionnaire, and the local search ecosystems are all still available.

Features we’re already working on

We’ve already gotten some terrific feedback from our Customer Advisory Board and other customers during a private beta period, and the product we’re releasing today is much better as a result. Going forward, we’re anxious to hear from the Moz community what feature areas you’d like to see us expand into.

Features currently on our list include:

• allowing for the editing of single locations in-app

• building custom-branded and emailed reports

• showing individual listing progress over time

• adding additional search engine and data partners
  (if you’re interested in a data partnership with Moz, please email Ryan Watson!)

I have a feeling it will be a common request, but at this point Moz Local only supports U.S. business locations. International versions of this product aren’t in our near-term roadmap for development.

Thanks all around

There are a lot of people to thank, with such a big product release—it has definitely been a team effort:

• the entire Local Engineering and Inbound Engineering teams here at Moz

• the Marketing and Community teams, especially my “point person” for coordinating those efforts, Elizabeth Crouch

• the Executive Team for giving us the leeway and the budget to build this product

• Josh Mortenson, Elijah Tiegs, and Elizabeth Crouch for our video

• Jackie Immel and Courtney Davis for their help in coordinating our beta period

• our beta testers for their participation and patience!

• the data aggregators and directories who have partnered with us

• the users of GetListed who have given us so much great feedback over the years

I’m sure that’s leaving dozens, if not hundreds of people out—but I’m truly grateful for the support of everyone in the local search community over the years. As with many software endeavors, it’s taken us a little longer to get here than we’d hoped, but we also hope that you in the Moz community think it was worth the wait!

The formal press release announcing Moz Local can be found here.

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