This post was published over three years ago. Check out our updated 2017 Moz Local Review post.

Moz Local

A year and a half after Moz’s acquisition of GetListed, David Mihm’s local listings baby has finally burst out of the womb. Business listings management is one of the trickiest aspects of local SEO and David has long been focused on trying to simplify the process for SMBs. So let’s see what Moz Local can do for you out of the gate:

Price: $49 per year per location ($84/location starting Oct. 1, 2014)

The heart of the service is business listings data submission to the main local business listing data aggregators (these guys definitely need an acronym):

  • Acxiom
  • Factual
  • Infogroup
  • Neustar Localeze


It’s interesting that in his announcement post David lists Foursquare as a data aggregator, which I suppose it is in some way, but, well that’s for another post.

Moz Local also allows you to claim/update a listing on the following local directory sites:

  • Foursquare
  • SuperPages
  • Best of the Web Local
  • eLocal

Where they don’t have a relationship with the publisher (e.g. YP.com, Yelp or Facebook), Moz Local crawls the site and provides links to those sites to update out of whack profiles. According to David, they will be rolling out more publishers in the Spring and Summer.

The site has very simple interface. Here’s how it works:

  1. Search for your business using the name and zip:
    Moz Local Biz Search
  2. Select the most accurate listing in the results:
    Moz Local Results
  3. Check for “Completeness”, Inconsistencies and Duplicates
    Moz Local Completeness Score
    The system basically looks for things like whether or not you have a photo on a specific profile, the wrong phone #, different business name, etc. You can easily scroll over the bar for each site and see what the issue is, or you can click on the different tabs to get a list view.From this interface, you can then purchase a “listing” and submit the updated data along with various enhanced content such as hours of operation, categories, etc.The tool also provides a csv template to upload multiple locations. The csv is formatted to match the Google+ Local data format. I particularly like the “category override” option where you can specify a category that is not offered by Google to override the standard categories. And the tool has a nice UI to allow you to search Google’s categories. Alas, you can’t use “SEO consultant” as an override 🙁
    *****

    Some random thoughts/answers to questions:Can Moz Local Really Fix Duplicates? Not Really Yet
    I was psyched to see the “Duplicates” tab. Squashing dupes is one of the tougher tasks in local SEO.  While it’s great that Moz Local helps you identify the dupes at the different publishers and aggregators, it still doesn’t actually allow you to squash them. It merely offers links to the publishers’ sites to ask them to squash them. The industry still needs a more automated way to do this across publishers and aggregators.  David tells me this is “coming very soon”. In my trials I found Moz Local’s dupe-matching algo missed a fair amount of dupes, but David assured me they are working “with a number of local experts” on improving that system. IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR DUPE LISTINGS AT THE DATA AGGREGATORS BEFORE YOU USE THIS TOOL ELSE IT COULD CREATE NEW DUPES.Photos & ReviewsMoz Local Photos & ReviewsThe tool displays photos and reviews associated with a business.  It also allows you to connect images from your website with your listings.  I didn’t see the ability to upload photos. This feature feels a bit tacked on at the moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this morphs into a more robust tool for managing this data.Real Time Updates
    According to David, the only real-time or near real-time updates occur on Factual and Foursquare. Real time does not appear to be a focus for Moz Local at this point.Verification
    In order to update a listing, the NAP data must match a business’ Google+ Local page or its Facebook page.  While this won’t prevent spammers from hijacking listings via ML, it does mean they have to hijack your G+L or Facebook pages first. A potential downside of this system is that you can’t implement tracking numbers through the service unless they match your G+L or Facebook phone numbers.Do Listings Get Overwritten Upon Cancellation?
    Based on my discussions with David, it sounds like the listing data will stick at the publisher site level as long as the publisher doesn’t do anything to overwrite it, which as you may know from experience is very likely to happen. While it’s good that ML helps you get the data right at the aggregator level, that’s still not insurance that the data will stick at the publisher level. Of more concern is the following statement from the FAQ about what happens when you cancel a listing :“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.This means if you had bad data before you used Moz Local, you’ll have bad data when you cancel, and you’ll potentially have different data coming out of the different aggregators, which could be a big issue for you Google Local rankings. I guess this is no different than the problem you had before you used Moz Local, and you could argue that getting the data right at InfoGroup and Factual could be better than what you started with, but seems like there’s no need to “revert” back at the aggregator level. I am guessing this is driven by Neustar Localeze and Acxiom rules, but it is not ideal. I hope that Moz and the aggregators figure this out. If Google is looking at your business data at a meta-level, this has the potential to take your rankings back to square one upon cancellation. Moz’s assumption appears to be that Google trusts InfoGroup more than the other aggregators.

    What Happens If You Have Already Claimed A Profile At a Publisher Site?
    You will not be able to update your profile on SuperPages via ML if you have already claimed it on SuperPages.

    Final Thoughts…For Now
    Moz Local appears to have the makings of a great tool for managing your core business listings data at the aggregator level.  While the tool is still in its early days, it’s functionality, simple UI and compelling price point make it easy to recommend for basic updating of NAP data at the data aggregator level. It still needs some fine-tuning in its dupe and inconsistencies detection, but I would expect this to be solved in Moz Local 1.1 or 1.2.

    The tool also provides another handy free citation research tool to help detect dupes and other issues. I can see this quickly becoming one of the more useful Moz tools out there and it should be interesting to watch it develop.

    Congrats to David Mihm and his team at Moz! Check out Moz Local here.

Share This Story!

About Author

81 Response Comments

  • Josh Gates  March 18, 2014 at 12:56 pm

    Great review Andrew! First one I’ve seen too. Having beta tested it as well, I find your review spot on. Great start but really looking forward to the future of Moz Local

  • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 1:00 pm

    Thanks Josh. The Local SEO Tool market is really going crazy these days. I think this tool is going to be a nice addition to industry.

  • Dave Eddy  March 18, 2014 at 1:12 pm

    Awesome review on what looks like an awesome product. Would love a tool like this for the Australian market!

  • Dharam Chaudhari  March 18, 2014 at 1:13 pm

    man.. i am excited to try moz local.. thanks Andrew.. got a thanks to david and moz.. and we know’s moz created amazing platform but with David.. it is exciting ..

  • Dean Dowd  March 18, 2014 at 1:19 pm

    Is there functionality in this tool that isn’t in Yext or similar services?

    • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 1:25 pm

      Dean,

      In its current state I would compare Moz to a “pretty” version of UBL. IMO it is a very different animal than Yext. If ML can get better at detecting dupes and inconsistencies – no reason to suspect they won’t – then it will be useful for solving NAP consistency issues because of its low price.

  • Amber Robinson  March 18, 2014 at 2:20 pm

    Great review, Andrew. I really appreciated getting to take a closer look. I guess my only questions or concerns are the similarities to other powerlistings that I get directed to when I want to edit or claim a basic listing like Local.com. With the authority moz has and now offering a similar tool, how many more citation sites are going to refer me to their tool with a fee attached? The FAQ response to what happens when you cancel a listing is also disappointing. Just my thoughts.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 2:41 pm

      Amber,
      I don’t know, but I don’t think you are going to see Moz Local become the exclusive way in to any of these sites. Re how this compares to Powerlistings – fewer publisher sites and significantly less functionality but ML hits Localeze & Acxiom while I don’t think Yext does at this point. But these are two very different services for different needs.

      I agree re the cancellation issue. It’s not a great design IMO, but like I said I suspect this is more driven by the aggregators v. Moz.

  • Dharam Chaudhari  March 18, 2014 at 2:36 pm

    @Andrew, you are right in way regarding one cancel their membership with moz. my question would be why will they do that ? i hope each business owner understand need of it.

  • David Mihm  March 18, 2014 at 3:03 pm

    Andrew, thanks for the thoughtful and balanced write-up!

    And thanks for all of the comments, guys. I’ll add a couple of my own to answer some of the questions above.

    @Dave – we know there’s a lot of international demand but we’re just not able to support non-U.S. countries with our current engineering and help team resources. It’s definitely an area we’ve considered and that I personally hope to get into in the future.

    @Dharam / Amber – Yes, this is just a standing policy that a couple of the individual aggregators have in place. Moz would prefer the listings simply remained as-is at the time of last submission (which many sites DO honor).

    @Dean – I would say our primary differentiators vs. Yext are our focus on the primary data aggregators and our pricing. If you’re looking to update your listings pretty frequently or with much richer content than the standard fields in our product, Yext will probably make more sense for you.

  • Josh Gates  March 18, 2014 at 3:07 pm

    good answers David and excellent work to you and your team~!

  • Amber Robinson  March 18, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    @David – appreciate the feedback and congrats to you and your team!

  • Joe Goldstein  March 18, 2014 at 4:31 pm

    I swear I was about to put a client through Moz Local so I could publish one of the platform’s first reviews.

    It looks like you win again. Well played.

  • Doyal Bryant  March 18, 2014 at 4:34 pm

    Very fair and balanced review. As one of the pioneers in local business listing and profile management, I am glad to see David and the Moz offering to supplement the growing opportunity to help business with the local search fragmentation. We have got to get a new source to draw the local ecosystem map, independent of a vendor. Perhaps you can step up Andrew.

  • Joe Goldstein  March 18, 2014 at 4:36 pm

    In any case, I was definitely afraid that the dupe listing finder wouldn’t actually do anything about the dupes. Once that’s fixed, even the cancellation issues will be excusable.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 5:04 pm

    Joe – you may be right. I may be crazy.

  • Lance  March 18, 2014 at 6:14 pm

    Went thru the process to list some clients. 1 did not have a FB page, and the other did not have G+ or FB. It gave me errors and wouldn’t let me continue. it appears that you must first have both a google+ AND facebook listing before you can take advantage of the ML aggregation.

    is this correct?

    • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 6:29 pm

      I think that’s right Lance. ML uses that data to verify the listing data. I guess the assumption is that your G+L & FB data must be correct. But there are probably a lot of cases where that’s not true

  • Jim Rudnick  March 18, 2014 at 6:33 pm

    Canada. Us Canucks need Canada to be included….hey, we’re bigger’n California in population and 11 times the size of Texas, eh!!! 🙂

  • Eugene Belenky  March 18, 2014 at 7:52 pm

    My 2 cents. The real time update is the absolute must to succeed nowadays. End user does not want to know about aggregators nor they want to wait and check how and where their info is getting published. Building relationships with end publishers is the best strategy for the services like this.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 18, 2014 at 8:00 pm

    David, thanks for stopping by on what must be a busy day.

    Eugene, everyone would love real-time, certainly the bigger brands do, but there is also a huge market that is more concerned about price.

  • Jason Nelson  March 18, 2014 at 8:46 pm

    Thanks for reviewing this new tool, Andrew. I’m interested to see what all features are added to it in the coming months. It’d be great if Moz could include at least one location with a Pro Membership to test it out and evaluate.

  • Russ Offord  March 19, 2014 at 8:10 am

    I would be interested in knowing the ‘exact’ wording of the agreements with the various major aggregators regarding the listing data and reversions.

    I spoke with Yext management regarding their agreement with their partner websites. They said that upon service cancellation by a customer, the IYP venues are allowed to keep ONLY the basic NAP info (name/address/phone #) and nothing else that didn’t already exist before the sync.

    In my experience with cancelling Yext for several clients (even after a year + of service) a LARGE amount of listings will simply disappear. Yext says that if the listing did not already exist before you signed up with Yext and the listing was created as a result of their sync, then the listings are more likely to disappear upon cancellation (and/or revert to old data for some venues). This is most likely because those IYP venues no longer ‘trust’ the source of the data as they did before.

    Will Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze actually “revert your listings to their status prior to your Moz Local subscription”… or is it more likely that they ‘may’ choose to revert the data?

    I know it is up to each individual venue to determine how they trust various data sources, but my hope has always been that by the end of a 1 year of intensive listing cleanup work, there will be so little ‘bad’ data that the aggregators will WANT to keep the data by the time the subscription runs out because they can trust it.

    Russ

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 9:46 am

    Russ,

    The data aggregator process is so complicated that even if they wanted to keep the Moz Local data after you cancelled I doubt they would be willing to invest in re-architecting their systems to allow for this kind of exception.

    The data guys may never trust an outside source like this because if they do, that obviates the need for a data aggregator.

    I don’t know if this is the case, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an aggregator like InfoGroup doesn’t 100% trust the Moz Local data. More likely it assigns the ML data a higher trust score than other inputs, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t/won’t be overwritten. If someone from IG or one of the others is reading this and I am wrong about that, please let us know.

  • Michael Klasno  March 19, 2014 at 9:51 am

    Excellent review Andrew! What happens if you use ML for the data aggregators that Yext doesn’t reach. Will it cause problems? The extra $50 year would be a cheap insurance policy to ensure total coverage. Any problems you cn see?

  • Chris  March 19, 2014 at 10:01 am

    two words….THREADED COMMENTS =]

    • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 10:19 am

      one of these days Chris. one of these days.

  • Mike Wilton  March 19, 2014 at 10:02 am

    Really interesting to see how fast the FAQ changed on this product. I asked David in the comments yesterday to clarify what happens to your listings if a subscription is cancelled. Originally the FAQ simply stated,

    “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.”

    Now I see in your post, and in the updated FAQ that it speaks to specific networks that will revert back, etc. This is my biggest problem with most of the tools out there. Sure, it makes our jobs a little easier, but if our client ever decides they no longer wish to pay for the service then you basically have to start over manually for a lot of the listings, which is a huge pain. I wonder what the reasoning is for all of the sites reverting back after cancellations of tools like Moz local or Yext. Is it an issue at the publisher lever, or with the tools?

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 10:04 am

    Another thought on Russ’ comment: It may be better for a listing to disappear than revert. As I mentioned in the review, if it reverts at half the aggregators but stays the same at the others, then it’s possible that dupes will be created at Google, which uses Acxiom & InfoGroup.

    Of course, there’s no real “better’ here. The whole system is a Rube Goldbergian nightmare. And that’s why we local SEOs are the noble warriors that we are.

  • Doyal Bryant  March 19, 2014 at 10:16 am

    You are right Andrew UBL as one of the first with data aggregators knows form hundreds of thousands of businesses what happens. Infogroup will take you out off the Express Update file but do not take you out of their main database that they submit to the local publishers. So some of the enhanced content “may” not stay, but the NAP is there for matching on advertising and other database needs by the big local publishers.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 10:22 am

    Doyal,

    So in your case where the NAP moves upstream to the main dbase, it’s still vulnerable to getting overwritten. And I bet if you had problems before you used UBL or ML, those problems have a good chance of coming back right?

  • Doyal Bryant  March 19, 2014 at 10:45 am

    Nothing is consistent among current database delivery. We recommended three years ago a override flag since this was coming from a “paying” owner of the business for at least one year, but they have not been able to get that with the local publishers.

  • Russ Offord  March 19, 2014 at 11:27 am

    I would gladly pay the $49 for this Moz Local service just to get a company listed in Localeze, whom did not previously exist in their database.

    My company once had a very expensive (a couple thousand dollars) bulk/agency subscription with Localeze, but we canceled after the first year, so now I’d have to either beg or pay another company to list it for me or pay the full $297 regular end-user price.

    I was quoted $200 by another marketing agency with a Localeze subscription which included $100 for their cost and $100 for their time to ‘upload’ the listing.

    As far as reversion vs deletion… I believe that a listing is more likely to be reverted if it existed with different data before these types of services and more likely to be deleted if it did not exist in the first place (at least with the IYP venues with whom Yext works.)

    The $49 Moz Local service (for one year) would at least get the listing into Localeze’s database. I doubt that they would actually delete the listing entirely, but it could end up being flagged as non-authoritative after the subscription is cancelled after the 1st year.

    Thoughts?

  • Doyal Bryant  March 19, 2014 at 11:38 am

    Thx Andrew. We started as you remember with the idea of one place to create a database or repository where are the local publishers could pick up for free the data from the business. Not going to happen in my life time. The fragmentation and insanity around business profile syndication, distribution, and management of the profile has created a multi-million dollar business for UBL, the aggregators, and the many new companies like Moz, Go-Daddy, and others offering their version of insanity. I am sure this is not a “One and Done ” deal for a business but will need management as publisher continue to struggle with the many feeds they get with duplicates, different business profile data, etc.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 11:38 am

    Russ,

    If someone is quoting you $100 for Localeze, either they are shafting you or they don’t have a good deal with Localeze. And I bet their cost isn’t $100 because they likely have a confidentiality agreement with Localeze that prevents them from saying what their cost is. But I quibble.

    The Moz Local price will force anyone who has been insanely marking up Localeze to stop.

    “I believe that a listing is more likely to be reverted”

    This is one of the fundamental issues – you don’t know what will happen. Listings management should not operate like a religion. So my opinion on what happens after deletion is just as valid as my opinion about the flying spaghetti monster http://www.venganza.org/

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 11:41 am

    Doyal,

    Just like there is no crying in baseball, there is no “one and done” in Local…

  • James Gibbons  March 19, 2014 at 12:44 pm

    So far so go, the process is very easy. Day two only two listings have been verified though. Glad to have foursquare in the mix.

  • Eugene Belenky  March 19, 2014 at 1:34 pm

    After the deletion business does not cease to exits in the real world, the deletion is not warranted, otherwise it would be a sweet deal for local SEOs to charge clients for the same submission over and over again.

    Thanks to all “local SEOs” we have such a mess in the local space that business owners need the clean up tool more than submission now 🙂

  • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 2:07 pm

    Don’t be a hater Eugene. You’re better than that.

  • Eugene Belenky  March 19, 2014 at 2:12 pm

    🙂

  • Aaron Watters  March 19, 2014 at 2:38 pm

    Great article! I’m so pumped to utilize Moz Local in all its awesomeness 😀 #lovemozproducts

  • Robert Leary  March 19, 2014 at 3:03 pm

    I’m glad that there is a legit alternative coming along to Yext. I like Yext, but I wish I didn’t have to charge so much for it (due to high cost for us certified resellers). I love what Moz does, but this product has a long way to go. There were many listings that I know for a fact exist, but didn’t even show on my scans – not to mention the dupe issues.

    Anyone have any thoughts on using both Powerlistings and Moz Local for the same listing? I’m worried they’ll cause havoc with each other.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 19, 2014 at 5:40 pm

      Robert,

      I don’t see ML as an alternative to Yext. There are a number of similarities between what these tools do on the surface which is understandably confusing, but, in my view, the current iteration of ML (with solid dupe detection and suppression hopefully coming soon) is basically a way to get your data updated at the aggregator level plus a couple of publishers. This should help your SEO over time, if you catch the dupes and can keep them down and optimize your NAP. Yext currently updates InfoGroup & (see my comment below) Factual and a number of top publishers (wouldn’t be surprised if ML gets those eventually too) but its real-time nature and its positioning as a “location management marketing platform” (my words not theirs) is quite different from Moz Local.

      If you are looking for a low-cost way to try to manage your NAP issues, Moz Local should eventually be a great tool. If you are looking for a platform to help manage your location marketing program, I think Yext is heading in that direction.

      Re using them on the same listing – my guess is that whichever one locked the listing first gets the priority.

  • Robert Leary  March 19, 2014 at 6:39 pm

    Andrew, this is a great explanation. Frankly, I’m very much looking forward to seeing where this new Moz tool goes. I’m going to try using both for some of my listings and see what happens. I just wish we didn’t have to guess so much. I know it’s better to do them all by hand…but that is no guarantee either! Another $49 is nothing.

  • Sandeep  March 19, 2014 at 10:56 pm

    Great review @Andrew

  • Peter Cunningham  March 20, 2014 at 2:45 am

    Shame OSM is not included in the list

  • David Mihm  March 20, 2014 at 7:15 am

    Hey everyone, sorry for the delayed response in coming back to this thread :). We had an all-company meeting at Moz (unrelated to our launch) & it was difficult to get away.

    @MikeWilton – We updated our FAQ page in the Help Hub about 24 hours before launch after hearing back from our distribution partners; unfortunately I overlooked the “How It Works” FAQ in my site review on Monday so the update to that page didn’t make it in until after launch. Apologies for any confusion.

    @Andrew, you mention Yext submitting to Infogroup, but I don’t see Infogroup mentioned on their network page. Any details on that service?

    As far as the couple of questions about managing listings on two different platforms, we don’t really have any customer data points on that yet, given how new our product is :). At this point, it’s probably not something that I would recommend, for some of the reasons that Andrew mentions above.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 20, 2014 at 9:56 am

    David, for some reason I had it in my head that Yext supports Infogroup but I just checked and I don’t see it in the dash. I’ll update the comment shortly.

  • Darren DeMatas  March 20, 2014 at 11:32 am

    Moz does a good job with marketing, they got me all excited about switching over. I emailed Moz, “I have listings with Yext, I want to cancel Yext and go with Moz. What will happen?”

    I was not convinced of their response. It seems like there would just be a new set of listings, which is NOT at all what I want.

    • Andrew Shotland  March 20, 2014 at 11:40 am

      Darren, what exactly was their response?

  • Darren DeMatas  March 20, 2014 at 11:54 am

    Hey Andrew – I am doing a write up now that mentions your post and the discussion around Moz Vs Yext. Ill ping you on G+ when I do.

    Moz Local provides a little bit of a different service than Yext, by updating the core data aggregators that the primary local search engines rely on for their baseline data. On sites where there is overlap in our network (like Foursquare and Factual), keeping your account with Yext may cause difficulties in managing locations on these sites.

    If you choose to cancel your Yext account and use Moz Local to publish your listings, we’ll establish listings on all the partners in our network—but we cannot override your existing listings with some of our partners if you’re managing them separately.

  • Russ Offord  March 21, 2014 at 6:13 am

    In terms of managing listings that are already under Yext’s control (be it manually or by another services), it would be necessary to opt out of those particular IYP venues on Yext. They give you an option to do so in the dashboard.

    Yext does NOT ‘fix’ the data at the source no does Yext ‘claim’ the listings, but rather they pay the IYPs to have their data ‘overlaid’ and ‘locked’ in place to override any other data as long as you pay their yearly fee.

    When the payments to Yext stop, the lock comes off and the listings are susceptible to reversion and/or deletion by the individual IYP venues.

    I know this because of several conversations with Yext support and management, reading their blog posts and certified partner newsletters, as well as my own independent case studies when my clients have cancelled their Yext services.

  • Dave  March 21, 2014 at 9:08 am

    Andrew: Terrific review. Terrific knowledgeable and insightful comments.

    David: Congrats on the launch and thanks for chiming in.

    My own experience is that it is at least insightful to engage in direct citation building on a somewhat current basis as the various directories and the aggregators, and googles connections to them is and has been in a constant state of flux over many years.

    On top of that the pricing structure constantly changes…and each source is changing its perspective on the “realness” of a claimed listing.

    The entire process is under constant churn.

    Great article, comments and kudo’s to David for jumping aboard…and nice product.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 21, 2014 at 9:50 am

    Dave,

    You have hit the nail on the head. But even direct citation building is no guarantee of citation permanence because of the instability of the entire business listings data system.

  • Steve  March 22, 2014 at 6:43 am

    Moz Local seems like it would be GREAT for my current client scenarios, BUT….. i see no info on how to pay for the service which I presume is necessary since it is clearly labeled at $49/year.

    The only slightly relevant page toward this appears to be the one that wants you to upload a CSV file.

    Any recommendations on how to actually start & when / where to pay?

    Thanks!!

  • Kathleen  March 25, 2014 at 12:21 pm

    Is it necessary for a business to have both a Google+ Local page AND a Facebook page in order to use Moz Local? What if the business doesn’t have a Facebook page? Thanks!

    • Andrew Shotland  March 25, 2014 at 12:46 pm

      No. You just need one or the other. From their FAQ:

      When you submit a listing on Moz Local, it must match an existing Google Places or Facebook listing across all of the following attributes: Business Name, Address, Phone Number, and Website. Because you’ve already gone through the phone or postcard verification process with Google and/or Facebook, your Moz Local listings will be validated if they exactly match Google and Facebook.

  • Kathleen  March 25, 2014 at 12:51 pm

    Thanks so much, Andrew.

  • Andre  March 26, 2014 at 2:13 pm

    Great review, thanks for taking the time to share your early review of this service. My first takeaway is that we are disappointed with the delivery vs. what was promised.

    Their intro video talks about how expensive and time consuming it is to claim all these listings, but really other than submitting the data feed I don’t see where this ML service solves that problem, except to make it easy to find out where to sign up and verify manually all of these various accounts.

    It has potential, but we’re still hunting for that one-click, publish and verify unicorn I guess. Back to doing it manually!

  • David Mihm  March 26, 2014 at 2:53 pm

    Hi Andre,
    We don’t currently offer a web interface to submit locations one-at-a-time, although that is coming shortly, as I mentioned to Andrew. But we still want to provide the ability to update locations on a one-off basis for folks when they come to look up a single business.

    Using our CSV file you can indeed submit to the sites in our network simultaneously, even for a single-location business.

    Hope that helps explain our service a bit better.

  • David Corrigan  April 2, 2014 at 6:27 am

    Thanks for the review….I am now using Moz Local, seems like a no brainer. The issue I am running into, is in the incomplete section. It say’s we don’t have a Facebook business listing as well as other listings, and I can’t find a way to link up these within the tool. If you or anyone else knows how to do this, please share with me.

    • Andrew Shotland  April 2, 2014 at 7:11 am

      Have you tried adding the FBI page in th social urls column on the spreadsheet? That might do it

  • David Mihm  April 2, 2014 at 7:19 am

    Hey David,
    Glad you think it’s a no-brainer 🙂 The inability to find Facebook listings is one that’s popped up relatively recently. Our engineers are actively working on a solution as we speak. Happy to investigate your issue further if you’d like to email me davidm@moz.com (or just post your NAP here).

    Best,
    David

  • David Corrigan  April 2, 2014 at 8:17 am

    I think the reason it hasn’t shown up yet, is because I just submitted it all to Moz last week and it probably takes a little time before it all gets put in. Do you know how long it usually takes from the time the form is submitted to when it actually gets done?

  • David Mihm  April 3, 2014 at 7:37 am

    Hi David,
    Some listings should populate immediately (Factual for example), although we’re currently working through an API translation issue with their engineering team. Others (such as Acxiom) will take closer to 4-6 weeks.

  • Jerry Nordstrom  May 16, 2014 at 10:18 am

    Moz Local is a good idea, but is another disassociated add-on not connected to any form of workflow.

    Moz Local does not solve many of the key issues with local listings. Validation and duplication.

    Remember the days of “Submit your site to 100 search engines..”? This is today’s equivalent. Honestly, just a few local directories deliver all the traffic, its not all that hard to manage your listings in the top 3-5 for your business.

    Moz in general is tutorial service with a few snap on tools and a re-hash of Google Analytic reports.

    To become a truly powerful offering, MOZ needs to tie their tools together into a logical workflow process overlaid with updated “how to” information and videos.

  • Traci Dillard  May 30, 2014 at 1:46 pm

    It’s refreshing to see an alternative to YEXT. About to start using MOZ for this tool. They are a great company. I am not a fan of YEXT at all!

  • Brian Gallagher  August 24, 2014 at 7:58 pm

    I like Moz Local to check the status of each listings accuracy, but I didn’t need to pay for the service to see that. But I have a problem with implementing & understanding the service once I purchased it.

    Once I have uploaded my CSV file, do I then sit & wait? After CSV upload the Moz Local dashboard shows me many incompletes. Should I be waiting for the aggregators to distribute the citation data and if that’s the case why doesn’t Moz tell me that?

    Or should I be going through each incomplete and update or create new listings as needed right now? It’s just not clear to me exactly what the CSV upload feature does and how I’m supposed to know what to touch and what not to touch once it’s been uploaded.

    For a service that is supposed to make things easier – it doesn’t do a good job of explaining exactly how the service works.

  • pauline  September 4, 2014 at 9:04 am

    I am so lost in the world of SEO. Is this the best tool to get my business listed? No matter what I do on my own “google, forsquare, facebook, website” I don’t seem to be increasing my exposure. I only do business local so I thought this might be a good choice?

    • Andrew Shotland  September 4, 2014 at 9:27 am

      Pauline,

      You are not alone in feeling lost. Local SEO can be complicated. Instead of answering your question re whether or not Moz Local is the best tool for you (it may or may not be depending on a number of factors), I strongly recommend you engage a SEO consultant to help you navigate this stuff. Even if you are a DIYer, the cost of a few hours of consulting time should be less expensive than spending hours trying to figure this out for yourself.

  • Russ Offord  September 4, 2014 at 11:44 am

    I am glad to see the new updates announced here: http://moz.com/blog/moz-local-summer-updates

    You can automatically request duplicate listing closure now on some venues (that are in their networ) such as InfoGroup, Localeze, BOTW (that I have tested) but others require manual action on the client’s part (Bing, G+ Local, Facebook, HotFrog).

    At this point I don’t know how the duplicate closure requests are handled… is it just that Moz Local sends the venues an email… or do they have special API access to close them directly?

    I am monitoring some requests from today to see how long the dupes take to be closed.

    Oh, and get in all the submissions you can before the end of September, ‘cuz the price is going up by about 71% … from $49 to $84 per year in October!

  • Mike  August 16, 2016 at 1:31 pm

    Do not purchase or subscribe to Moz Local under any circumstances, especially if you have multiple locations! Again do not purchase this gig, it is a scam!

    I have been using Moz local since their Beta version years ago. And even then it was not the best tool: the data they place in directories are not 100% accurate. And when I called Moz to rectify these erroneous listings, I got 0 customer support! There is no phone number for Moz local because they don’t want to have to deal with unhappy customers, like me!

    I have 3 locations, and for 2 of those locations, I’ve been having Moz Local do the work. But unfortunately, for one of these locations Moz Local failed to do the job correctly and failed to even solve the issue! Even when I offered a solution they couldn’t care less about trying try it!!!

    My City Search listing is connected to my main location which I am managing myself. Thank God I did not purchase another Moz Local Crap for that location! This is what happened: instead of creating a new listing in City Search for my purchased packages, they merged my Los Angeles listing with my other location in Orange County! My first attempt was to fix the issue through them, but they failed. So I contacted City Search myself. Working with City Search I was able to fix it the problem! And I notified Moz Local not to push any data to City Search! I believe if you are working with these directories and you push your data yourself you also have the ability contact them: I did this myself. So now, a week later, I again found my listing at City Search changed my listing from Los Angeles to Orange County! Moz totally failed to offer me a solution, and basically you can just get in touch with CitySearch and fix it. So you don’t need Moz Local and they only make it worse for you. Just do it yourself like I did and save your money for other SEO tools.

    There is nothing in local directory listings you can’t do yourself. The Moz Local package is just a scam! The entire policy is about not giving any refunds whether or not they can fix issues! I offered them the solution but still they are so lazy that they wouldn’t even contact City Search to correct the information in my listing/s. But I did it myself and you can too.

    • George Freitag  August 16, 2016 at 2:14 pm

      Hi, Mike

      We’re having someone from our customer success team reach out to you so we can figure out what’s going on with your listing. If you don’t hear anything or if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me at george [at] moz [dot] com any time. Thanks!

    • KalQ  January 25, 2017 at 10:39 pm

      looks like it took an email to the right public forum to get support’s attention! so what ended up happening to your listing(s)? Did it get resolved??

  • Steve  April 21, 2017 at 11:44 am

    I bought Moz Local and am likely about to cancel it. It’s over simplistic approach makes it hard to know exaclty what it is doing? Did it automatically list my business? How do I check on it? What does Synch mean?

    The help section is more of a “what we do” instead of a “how to do it” section.

    Even after contacting support I was still lost. Is it just a plug-and-play. I open up the dashboard and have no idea what I am suppose to do.

    My impression is the UX is so simplified that you have no idea what it is actually doing or if you need to do anything to make it happen.

    JMHO. Hope this helps others.

  • Jason Brown  August 10, 2017 at 12:10 pm

    Looks like its time to update this review. Moz local is no longer $89.00. They now offer 3 tier pricing, $99, $149 and $249. Moz Local used to be real great back in the day. There is no real visibility into what is happening with your citations,. Prior to canceling they always showed up in progress. I had countless issues with bugs and glitches. Its not great if you have multiple locations.

  • Bianca Frank  August 2, 2019 at 3:17 pm

    Have used MOZ Local for a number of clients but again as others have pointed out there’s a bit of understanding of what is actually occurring. With their increase in pricing over the years it’s a hard sell to clients.