Moz Local is unveiling an important update to its service in June 2019. I interviewed David Pierce, a software engineer for Moz, about this update. He shares details on the improvements that promise to make Moz Local even more useful for managing online listings in local search.
Moz Local is a popular service that helps local businesses optimize their online presence to gain more leads and sales. So it’s interesting to see how this update will affect the Local Search industry as a whole.
Moz Local is adding new distribution partners and growing the features and analytics tools to help Moz Local users take charge of their organic listings.
Here are Moz’s details about the new update:
“The new Moz Local platform builds upon a strong foundation of duplicate detection and search-based approach, and will now incorporate:
- Full location data management across the platforms that matter most, with real-time updates
- Review management and social posting to engage directly with customers and push content across the local ecosystem
- Deep integrations with Google and Facebook for reporting and management
- Robust data cleansing process to ensure proper formatting for submission to third-party platforms
- Automated duplicate detection and deletion to save time and ensure accuracy across the web
- Store locator and location pages to provide search engines with a consistent source of data and content
- Suggestion engine for customized recommendations for increased accuracy, completeness, and consistency”
Interview with David Pierce, Software Engineer at Moz
What does Full Location Data Management mean and how does that help a small business generate more inquiries and/or sales?
“With so much information available across the web, it’s critical to own your own data at the source. In terms of your business or brand’s location data, ownership and management of that data can make or break a customer’s ability to find you, whether you’re a small business or one of many locations with a large enterprise.
Providing accurate, complete, and consistent information about your business will allow for customers to get in touch, find your storefront, give you a call, and more — making this a critical piece for a small business’s growth of both general inquiries and sales.
The new Moz Local will bring improved location data management through active, continuous syncing to our expanded partner network, ensuring that customers can find you the moment they need you.”
Regarding review management, how does this integrate with Google and Facebook, and how does this affect lead generation?
“Review management integrates with both Google and Facebook, an improvement upon review monitoring in the existing Moz Local tool.
Management of your reviews and online reputation allows you to not only keep up with what customers are saying about you, but also respond to any feedback and engage with customer-generated content.
Reviews have significant impact on purchasing decisions and visits to local businesses. According to data, 82% of buyers consider user-generated reviews to be “extremely valuable.” These types of findings make the management of your online reputation more important than ever.”
Data cleansing: What kinds of errors does this help spot?
“Data cleansing is a new, improved process to ensure data accuracy. The data cleansing service is both an automated and manual review process conducted by our team to confirm that your location data is accurate and properly formatted for successful submission to the data partner network.
Additionally, location data is formatted differently for some partners. For instance, some of our partners require parentheses around the area code of a phone number, while others do not. Our data quality teams will verify that data submitted to each distribution partner meets their particular formatting guidelines.”
What are store locator and location pages?
“For large enterprises or brands with many locations, the store locator is a widget that can be integrated into a website to help searchers find the locations nearest to them.
The location pages feature allows our users to build individual pages for each location, hosting location-specific information and locally relevant content. These are both new to the Moz Local feature set.”
What is the “suggestion engine for customized recommendations?” What is it suggesting, how does it help generate leads/sales?
“Three primary factors support an effective online presence and improve local search results for a business: accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
The profile suggestion engine is a new feature designed to help our customers reach profile completeness. It will highlight data from other verifiable sources as suggestions to add to your location’s profile — meaning location descriptions, phone numbers, opening hours, and more are complete and consistent across the web.”
Moz Local Improves
Moz Local has been described to me by a successful real estate professional as a no-brainer for anyone in local search. He said it was something every small business should subscribe to by default. So it’s exciting to see Moz is taking the initiative to improve what is already regarded as an indispensable service.
