Improve Your Local SEO With Moz Local

Does your business have a physical location? If so, local SEO should be a part of your digital marketing efforts. With Local SEO, the objective is to increase your online presence for local searches. Local SEO goes beyond just trying to appear on Google; it’s about having your business appear on other major local directories, such as Bing, Yelp, Apple Maps, and Foursquare too. While you can manually build out listings on these directories, the process can be time-consuming and involve strenuous efforts to verify your business. That’s where listing management tools, such as Moz Local or Yext, can be helpful. In this blog post, we’ll focus on Moz Local and walk you through how you can set up listings for your local business.

Establish a Consistent NAP

When you add a location to Moz Local, your business information will automatically be distributed to local directories and aggregators across the web. As such, it is important that you dedicate some time to your NAP (name, address, phone number) before inputting it into Moz Local. Make sure you choose a business name you’ll stick with and a local phone number. For your address, you’ll want to enter it into the USPS Look Up a ZIP Code Tool™. This tool will standardize your address with the appropriate abbreviations so you can strive for accuracy and consistency across the web. Once your NAP is ready to go, you can head over to Moz Local.

Purchase a Moz Local Plan

Moz Local currently offers three plans for its local listing management. For $129 per location per year, the Lite Plan allows you to manage your listing, distribute location data, and monitor reviews from the Moz Local dashboard. For $179, the Preferred Plan offers the same features plus the ability to respond to reviews from the dashboard. For $299 a year, the Elite Plan includes the Preferred Plan features plus distribution to additional directories not included in the previous plans, such as Yellow Pages and DexKnows. What plan you choose ultimately depends on whether you’re simply looking for a listing management tool or a reputation management tool as well. For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll focus on Moz Local’s listing management tool that is available in all three plans.

Get Started

To get started with Moz Local, you must first verify your Google My Business or Facebook listing and sync it with Moz. You can also manually input your information into your listing’s profile on Moz Local if there’s certain information you don’t want to sync over, such as UTM tracking parameters. Once you’ve added your business information in one of these three ways, your business information will automatically be distributed to local directories and data aggregators across the web. To reiterate, this is why standardizing your address before importing to Moz Local is so important!

Add Additional Information

When your listing is set up or synced with Moz Local, you’ll have access to tons of valuable information regarding your listing on the Moz Dashboard. You’ll be able to see all the locations you manage, as well as a grade for how complete each listing’s profile is, at-a-glance. This feature is super helpful for businesses with several locations. Clicking into a location will allow you to add information to increase Profile Completeness as much as possible to 100%. The information you can add includes:

• Basic Data: Business Categories, Service Areas, Fax Number, E-Mail, Notes on Opening Hours, Keywords, Short Description, Long Description
• Rich Data: Social Media Profiles, Payment Options, Business Attributes, Languages, Services
• Photos & Videos: Logos, Photos, Videos, Videos Descriptions

While not every directory that is synced by Moz Local will use all the information you enter, it’s important to add as much information as you can when setting up your account. This will allow the profiles that are generated by Moz to be as complete and helpful to your customers as possible.

Let Moz Local Do The Rest!

Once you’ve synced your business listing with Moz and added as much business information as possible, you can let Moz Local work its magic! For businesses that already have directory listings created, Moz will push your new information to them so they’re updated. For newer businesses, it might take a bit longer for the directories to generate a listing from Moz’s information. Even then, letting a listing management tool like Moz Local take control of your local listings will save you valuable time spent updating directories individually or going through the hassle of phone or postcard verification multiple times.