Moz Local Updates You May Have Missed on Your Summer Vacation

Posted by David-Mihm

Those of you who have logged into your Moz Local dashboard recently may have noticed a few updates this week! I thought I’d post a quick announcement to highlight them.

New distribution partners: Bing, Citysearch, and Insider Pages

Long-time users of Moz Local know that we’ve been helping you examine listing accuracy on two of these sites (Bing Local and Citysearch) since the earliest days of the former GetListed product.

Today we’re excited to announce that, in addition to monitoring, we’re now also distributing data on your behalf to these important partners as part of your US Moz Local subscription. (Bing is also included in the distribution network for our recently-announced UK product.)

With the second-largest market share among the search engines—including some estimates north of 20%—Bing is obviously a key place to make sure that your data is accurate, consistent, and complete. The company has been innovating its local display in near-lockstep with Google, and with local results becoming ever more prevalent as part of universal search, your Moz Local listings will be seen by more potential customers than ever (the number in the graphic above comes from applying a rough 25% multiplier to the volume numbers reported by Comscore).

Citysearch is obviously one of the premier brands in local search. In joint research that Darren Shaw and I conducted, Citysearch appeared as one of the top 10 citation sources in 86 out of 93 US local search markets we studied. It’s also ranked in the top 10 in this study from BrightLocal and this one by Nyagoslav Zhekov, also of Whitespark. Needless to say, it’s a pretty important citation source that we’re proud to have onboard.

And, as part of the CityGrid platform, Insider Pages is another key consumer destination and citation source on which Moz Local now helps you manage your listings as well. (We’ll be adding it to the listing details page shortly.)

New mobile-friendly interface

So far, only about 7% of you have been using mobile devices or tablets to analyze your listings on Moz Local—a number that hasn’t changed much in the last 18 months. I’ve been a bit surprised at this relative usage, but I’m guessing it’s partly a self-fulfilling prophecy given the (previous) suboptimal experience of trying to interact with the product on these devices.

Well, suboptimal mobile experience no longer! We’re finally walking the walk of responsive design thanks to some terrific work over the last several weeks from Jeff Crump, Noam Chitayat, Zach Sitler, Wes Carr, and the entire Moz Local engineering team. We’ve prioritized visuals we think are most compelling on mobile, and the experience will soon have full parity with desktop.

We hope this helps those of you who demonstrate Moz Local to clients and prospects out in the field on your tablets and smartphones — in addition to the small business owners who happen to find their way to our product directly.

Yahoo Local removed from listing monitoring

Other than the relatively silent announcement last spring that Yelp listings with reviews would override native Yahoo Local listings, Yahoo Local hasn’t gotten much love from Marissa Mayer or her predecessors. It has not had a significant user experience overhaul since at least March 2010.

Since the Yelp announcement last spring, I’ve advised consulting clients, Local U forum members, and conference attendees not to focus energy on Yahoo Local, but instead put an additional effort into getting Yelp reviews. Aside from what appears to be a recent temporary glitch, that strategy has served them quite well.

And now that there’s a white-hat way to prompt customers (TLDR: post check-in offers and let Yelp ask the customer for a review), it’s a much better use of time and mental energy to focus on Yelp reviews, which are also syndicated to Apple Maps, Bing, and many other sources.

If, as I suspect is the case for most of you, your primary interest in Yahoo Local is to remove bad listings, there’s some evidence that tweeting @YahooCare may resolve your headache.

Given the time and expense involved with native Yahoo Local listings, for the vast majority of you, I encourage you to focus instead on getting at least one review on your Yelp listing. We’ve adjusted our listing score algorithm to prioritize Yelp accordingly, and we’ve removed Yahoo to align with this recommendation.

What's next?

We’ve got a number of major updates still in the pipeline, including additional network destinations that we’re already working on integrating, and our biggest feature release since launch in March 2014. We’re excited to roll all of these out as soon as we can.

What features would you like to see us add to Moz Local? Let us know in the comments!

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