Editor's note: Since the publication of this post, Moz Local has become even more fully-featured. For a complete feature list, see https://moz.com/products/local/pricing.
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 one set cost 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
- 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 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.
Please expand to include Canada. We are not that far and we love your tools :)
Thanks for the comment, Kat. Expanding to Canada is not on our near-term roadmap but it's something we've discussed a lot internally and it's definitely top-of-mind.
+1 for Canada. I guess the distribution network is much different than the US with the addition of Canada Post and Yellow Pages Group?
Looking at hundreds of locations :)
+1 for Canada too!
Fantastic Tool!
Will this be available in the UK too? Really excited about it.
Also, will there be any Moz Analytics integration or is it going to be a completely separate tool?
Thanks,
Matt!
Great price point and huge win for the industry! #gomoz
We're excited and honored to partner with Moz on the new Moz Local!
Thanks from everyone at superpages.com (Dex Media).
Sounds like competition for Yext.
Good for Moz. Yext is overpriced at $500/year.
Doesn't Yext also claim the listing as well? It seems this MozLocal product is a feed to the aggregators rather than a claiming service.
It's great it is but as a European there is already tools for the same thing in the US but not over here and you don't really mention its US only at the moment and I find that frustrating.
There are rather a few of us over here that use your tools don't forget about us!
Hey Chris,
Appreciate the support for a European version. It's not on our near-term roadmap, however, until we're able to learn from our U.S. experience first.
Trying to get this service setup for a couple of local clients I am working with... you guys definitely need an online form in addition the CSV upload. Having to refer to documentation just so I can figure out the proper way to format fields like "hours" and "payment types" is a poor user experience. I should be able to enter that into a form and have you guys format it for me.
Hi Takeshi,
Yep, thanks for this feedback. We are actively working on a UI for exactly these types of submissions.
What happens when you cancel? Are we provided with the login information of each one of the listings?
Hi Prolet,
The most complete answer to that question is in our FAQ :)
Hi David
It looks like a wonderful product and service. Yet I am a little concerned about being 'locked in'. It's more a case of principle than the ongoing cost, though cost is obviously a factor. Your FAQ says:
"What happens if I cancel my listings with Moz Local?
"Moz Local will simply report to the sites in our network that the listing is no longer under management by one of our customers. In this event, Acxiom and Neustar Localeze will revert your listings to their status prior to your Moz Local subscription. In some cases, your other listings will lose enhanced content like website URL, secondary category information, logos, and other images.
"Moz Local will not actively remove your listing from our network of sites. You will always have the ability to reclaim your listings manually on each site if you decide to cancel your Moz Local subscription."
It's great that you explain the consequences of cancelling. However, I would appreciate a little more clarification regarding the different rules for different organisations - so that I can explain this to clients.
I notice in a comment below, you have said "I'll do my best to flesh out that FAQ a little more." - that would be great! Thanks.
This is awesome! I've been stressing the importance of citation building to several clients and we were leaning more towards Yext, because of the ability to update in real-time. Any idea of how long it will take for listings to update using the Moz platform?
Hi Brandon,
Glad to hear you are already considering Moz Local! The time-to-live for listings you submit depends on the provider we send to. API-based platforms like Foursquare and Factual should go live in near-real-time; more traditional databases like Acxiom will probably take closer to 4-6 weeks before we can confirm that your listings are live.
Hope that helps!
Sounds good. Thanks, David.
How does this compare to Local Market Launch? We at 180Fusion are avid Moz users, but because it has not been available until now, we have had to use other tools. Any feedback would be awesome.
Thanks,
Cody Jensen
I'm a little confused about what you mean by in app editing. Can I manage all of my listings here? Can I edit the information that you have? I found that with getlisted.org there were some citations that didn't seem to update on GL's end even after I had made the changes on the directory. Likewise, if I create a citation that isn't managed by Moz Local, can I add it? A benefit that I'm looking for is being able to manage all of client citations in one place instead of across several services and ultimately dumping them into Raven. A lot of duplication and extra time!
Hi Ben,
1) You can definitely edit the information we find about your business from the web prior to submitting. If we find changes on sites in our lookup network (the sites on the old GetListed), we'll reflect those changes in your Dashboard.
2) Currently there's no way for us to manage citations outside the eight partner sites I mentioned above in our blog post, but we're always looking to add more reach and depth!
I didn't see this question in any of the comments so I wanted to add it. I currently manage a few hundred locations for a franchise. The nice thing about using something like Yext is that it allows you to take over existing listings and update them. Looking through MozLocal it seems to only allow you to populate all your information and 'send' data. Is there anything in place to overtake current listings (even ones I have access to) and have the ability to take over existing citations that are "locked"? Thanks.
This is huge. We've used Yext for a few clients so far, but it hasn't been a huge help with the big data aggregators. Just yesterday we tried to advise a client on whether or not it was worth $400 to clean up 20 duplicate listings on Express Update, on top of paying for Yext.
If Moz Local really can do a better job of cleaning up those duplicates, that alone will be worth it. We can't wait to try it out ASAP.
The site looks great but I will miss getlisted.org
This is fantastic David. Hurry up Moz and get this launched in Europe! :)
Any idea how Moz Local compares with White Spark's citation building service? Thanks, and keep up the great work Moz. You guys rock!
Can this tool be used for a Content driven website and not for a local business?
any thoughts are welcome
This is a tool just for local businesses.
Can this be used in the UK?
I'd love if you could put in a biz's OLD address/phone info for those that have moved to find any old citations that still need updating, too. :)
Will this update inconsistent listings?
Nice - been looking forward to this release. Looks great!
Also, nice work Rand on the voice-over.
I love the new module for upload. I agree this is a great idea, I just wonder if 2 weeks is a good time to see only 1 updated citation. I had to go into foursquare and manually build it to even show 1 citation complete. I then thought I broke the import link so I re-imported a new CSV into the up-loader. I like the idea but two weeks is way to long when trying to help a customer with their local Citations.
Hi David - First of all, thanks to you & the team for getting this out in the market. Secondly, quick question: Is there a place w/in Moz Local to update things like latitude & longitude for addresses? I'm wondering if any of the data aggregators feed into things like Apple Maps or GPS software for things like in-car GPS systems/Garmins. Thanks!
Hi Alliou,
The short answer is yes and yes. You can specify lat/lng in your CSV file, and data aggregators like Infogroup, Acxiom, Factual, and Neustar Localeze feed Apple Maps, Google Maps, and other GPS companies.
Yay! Thanks!
I submitted a listing recently.. and I went through the "check listing" tool. There hasn't been any changes. Some aggregators such as localeze have already been updated according to my dashboard, yet the tool says my data is still inconsistent.
It's my understanding that mozlocal submits data to x number of aggregators. I am wondering what happens from there. Do other online directories pull data off these aggregators? If so, how long would this process take on average?
Hi,
Do you have any news on having Moz Local on other countries (Italy in my case)? Thanks!
Got the reply from a Moz kind guy from the chatbox :) Unfortunately they still do offer the service just to US, but maybe they'll do in the future.. Hope so, Moz Local can a great help and save of time for seo agencies and seo consultant
I'd love to know if you plan to expand this to international locations. We're in Spain and would like to see what our results look like.
Cheers,
Miriam
How would we tell which site were populated and which are not by MOZ local? Given the fact that it will only pouplate unclaimed listing
What a great tool! I know you are not planning on it so far, but if you made this available for Germany and Switzerland my life would be so much easier :)
David, I've been watching and waiting since you joined the MOZ team for this rollout! Thank you! We have several clients that I will present this to, and get them on-board. I definitely consider you my expert in local search!
Hurray!!
David, thanks for sharing all the features for Moz Local! I especially love the upcoming feature of "building custom-branded and emailed reports", which small firms like ours can use for clients and getting more and more signed up with the service in the near future! - Patrick
So this will work?
I'm not sure of your question. Can you add some detail? Thanks!
"
Absolutely! We designed Moz Local with agencies in mind. You can manage all of your clients' listings simultaneously from one dashboard. Our search feature lets you easily sort through locations by business name, zip code, URL, and other fields to find an individual location within a big list.
To provide simplicity and transparency for all of our customers, Moz Local costs $49/year per location."
Please clarify, if I have 10,000 clients how much would be the annual cost ?
Thanks,
J D
Hi J D,
To answer your question, the cost for 10,000 locations would be $490,000 annually.
Hi David,
Thanks for your quick replay.
I was afraid of your answer but they'll have to pay , you are the best option. ;-)
Regards,
J D
Hello
great nifty tool. Once a listing is submitted I am missing what should be done by me next.
When should I act on the errors presented.
I am missing some instructions on how to use the tool after a listing is taken by the tool.
please advise
Hi Guy,
We're actively working on a 'logged-in' view for the details of listings that you manage to make it more clear what next steps you should take, and what steps Moz Local is taken care of. We appreciate the feedback!
David - congratulations on launching Moz Local. I poked around a bit, ran a few queries using U.S. business names and the interface is slick. Nice work. I've been using Moz Pro for quite some time now, so it was quite easy to get accustom to the design and layout. I don't think I have anything else to add, as most people have already asked them above. The only thing I'll say is that, if it will put Canada on the roadmap, us folks up north would really benefit from a took like Moz Local :)
Thanks Jackson, yep, we know there's plenty of demand in Canada and the UK from this comment thread alone :)
and ireland ;)
ok thats a great price for such a tool, but I think it is not that helpful for none us markets, am I right?
nonetheless a pretty tool on the first look :)
Hi guys,
This service looks fantastic. Just wondering, will this service only be advisable for businesses with a US address? I have a client located in Australia but wants to market their products on their online store to specific cities in the US.
Hi David,
Yes, at this stage we're only able to support U.S.-based brick-and-mortar businesses with this product.
Ah...so is this what the old getlisted has morphed into....and when's gonna work here in CanuckLand David???
Kudos too...looks like just the thing to help manage time for us agency types, eh!
:-)
does the $49 per year include subscriptions to said data aggregation sites such as localeze, acxiom, etc.?
I have been impressed with competing services in the past with a great up-front sticker price, but later find out that you ALSO have to pay a yearly membership to the data sites to serve your data.
Also, how will the tool help to solve the problem of using call tracking numbers for each source? Currently, across 900+ locations, there is greater value for my company to add a call tracking number instead of the actual individual store location numbers so that we may know what volume of calls come from each data source and how well that source converts. by using the same local number across all local directories, we lose that valuable insight. I know that this goes against the grain of consistent NAP, but for large corporations, the insight is much more valuable than the rank influence right now.
Hi Brad, it does indeed include those subscriptions!
However, until there is support for the concept of call-tracking at the major aggregators and at Google, you won't be able to submit call-tracking local phone numbers through our service, unless you also list those numbers at Google or Facebook. 800 numbers are perfectly fine as secondary numbers.
great to know, David. Thanks for the reply.
Great service to help local business owners get business information across different platforms. The price point really stands out! Finally, there is an alternative to Yext on the market. Where can I find the list of websites that the information is distributed to? I also have other specific questions about the service. Is there a phone number where I can contact someone to get more information?
Hey Daniel,
We have a lot of info on our How it Works and Help FAQ pages ... but for easy reference, we publish your listings to Factual, Acxiom, Infogroup, Neustar Localeze, Foursquare, Best of the Web Local, eLocal, and Superpages.
The fastest way to chat with us is definitely to reach out to our friendly help team.
The vid looks great. I'm so gutted you don't have a UK version :(. Hopefully you can get something sorted in the future (please).
Wow what a makeover! Very snazzy...
Super stoked for this! I would love to see alerts on when new reviews are published and a local/map rank tracker to really round the tool out, but either way it looks great.
Thanks for those suggestions, Dave. We've got them on our feature request list!
Awesome. Bouncing between three tools gets a little old, then telling management we need more budget for the next "shiny new toy" get's old to them. So it would be great to have a super tool with everything under one roof. Thanks again.
David,
Will there be any options to download a report from the dashboard to show clients (PDF download maybe)? Or will there be any other reporting features for this tool besides the standard dashboard? Like others on this thread I'm debating whether to use Yext for some of my clients because of the real-time update benefit, so I'm looking for other benefits in this product. I think the direction you guys are moving in is awesome. Definitely keep up the great developments!
Eric,
Thanks for the questions.
We're definitely looking at brandable PDFs and enhanced reporting in our next set of features. Our platform works in near-real-time in terms of updating publishers that can support that, but we've decided to prioritize core aggregators above speed-of-updates with version 1.0.
This is great stuff David! Curious to know what happens to your listings, if anything, if someone discontinues the service though. I know I have heard stories of other services reverting listings, etc. Will moz work in a similar fashion, or will all of your data that has been submitted remain as is, but you'll lose the benefit of tracking listings, etc.
AI came across this section in the FAQ after I posted, but am curious if you notify clients of what sites will be impacted by cancellation in terms of the loss of URL, secondary category info, logos, etc.
"Moz Local will simply report to the sites in our network that the listing is no longer under management by one of our customers. In some cases your listings will lose enhanced content like website URL, secondary category information, logos, and other images.
Moz Local will not actively remove your listing from our network of sites. You will always have the ability to reclaim your listings manually on each site if you decide to cancel your Moz Local subscription."
Also, if a listing has already been claimed by someone manually, will they be able to manage it through the moz system?
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the question. With regards to cancellation, each site in our network is a little different--as I have time, I'll do my best to flesh out that FAQ a little more. Listings on Neustar Localeze and Acxiom will both revert to their pre-submission state; other sites will remain as-is with respect to core NAP and many will remove those enhanced fields when we stop publishing data to them.
If a location has been claimed on Localeze or Superpages, we won't be able to push data to it; other sites will have a more case-by-case resolution process to determine ownership. We'll do our best to message these cases to you in the User Interface of the tool.
Hope that is helpful.
In the case that a location is already claimed on Localeze, will Moz Local create another listing with the provided info since it can't push data to an already claimed one?
Hannah,
We will not create another listing; we simply won't be able to push to the existing Localeze listing.
Looks like a brilliant little tool. Would be nice to this work here in the UK though - hopefully it happens!
Do we need a Seo Moz $99 subscription to purchase the local MOZ? Or can we just have the local MOZ?
Hi Deepak,
This product is fully independent of Moz Pro and Moz Analytics & is available on a standalone basis.
Hi there!
This is awesome for local businesses, but... are you considering to add other countries soon? For now, is just USA, right?
Thanks,
Fran.
Any chance of rolling this out in the UK?
See the reply above...something about no other territories are their roadmap until they see how the US version goes.
Amazing cost to value ! Thank you - David Mihm ! So glad you joined the MOZ team. This is such a great solution. Bye bye Yext. Hello MOZ local. Question for David or anyone: How are the links treated in local listing directories now? Are they "follow" or "no follow" ? Does it matter? Just curious on the current Local search community views.
Hey David!
This looks like a fantastic tool. However, as someone who does SEO for a big business, we have 400(ish) local offices, and the locations and number changes routinely. Am I correct in assuming that there's no way to adapt this plan for something of that scale and mutability?
Hi Jacques,
You could certainly use our service after uploading your spreadsheet to Google Places to push that information out across the rest of the ecosystem; frequent changes will definitely cause headaches in the Local Ecosystem, though :)
Hey David!
Sounds interesting, but would you mind clarifying what "local ecosystem" means? And "ecosystem" in general, in terms of Moz?
Hi Jacques,
See this page (and subpages) :)
Hey David,
congratulations to you and the Local Team at Moz for this great service.
I almost instantly started testing it, after reading your post above. However I couldn't get the csv upload right. When you download the provided csv template and open it in Excel you're not presented with a column-separated view but with comma-separated values in column A. If you then use Excel's function text-to-columns, fill out the first row with all required info and save it as a csv (not as xls[x]) the upload verification throws an error.
I could only get it to work, when never opening it in Excel, but only editing in the required infos with a simple text editor.
I guess most people will open it in Excel and might run into problems that way.
Greetings Nico
Hi Nico, thanks for that feedback. Can you tell me what version of Excel you're running, and whether it's Mac or PC? I'll have our engineering team investigate shortly.
This is awesome and great service to help local business. Looks like a Fantastic Tool!
I basically just sent out my info through getlisted.org (pre moz-local) and I've already done a good amount of the listings. What benefits would the Moz Local provide for this location besides making sure all information is coherent?
Hi Michael,
If you've already claimed a lot of your listings, then it's this tool won't provide as much value for you as other customers in terms of the time savings. In some cases our product will enable access to enhanced fields that aren't available on basic listings (such as Neustar Localeze).
Looks very interesting, especially the price of the services MOZ offered. David Mihm Will this be available for India? Cheers!
What are the numbers of days under free trail?
Hi Gaurav,
This product doesn't have a free trial on the distribution side, because we send your listings onto the sites in our network (and incur a charge) as soon as you upload them to us.
You're welcome to use the individual listing lookup service and category tool for free as a Moz community member, however.
Individual lookup service is good enough for me. Thanks David!
Definitely of great interest for me. Since I do my own website and marketing having this to sort through all the info out there that I'm not even aware I have. Great tool!! This should streamline the process for many of us small time marketers.
A Very Nice Update the new Look is much more useful and user friendly .... Keep up the Good Work Team Moz.
Regards,
Ahmed Adnan