[Build Backlinks Online] Announcing Moz Local: Simultaneous Listing Management on All Major Aggregators for $49/Year

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Announcing Moz Local:
Simultaneous Listing Management on All Major Aggregators for $49/Year'

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/searchâand 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 releaseâit
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




Derric Wise and Nick Santos for the amazing new branding and look-and-feel




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 outâbut 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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