UPDATED January 2016
Check out our latest Moz Local test with 20 months of data!
Our Moz Local Review Findings
When Moz launched their new Moz Local listing management tool in March, we at Two Octobers were pretty excited. The price is right ($49/year), but will it live up to the promise? I’d like to think that it has to be top notch for @DavidMihm to put his stamp on it. Here is our Moz Local review after 5 weeks in the program.
Moz Local submits listing data to 15 websites and databases (below). A “% Complete” score indicates overall performance for each listing. Completeness aggregates inconsistencies, incomplete profiles, duplicate listings, and fully complete profiles across the 15 sites measured.
Methodology
We signed up 7 business locations to test it out. To keep the test honest, we’re not doing any other work on them. After 5 weeks in the program all listings improved, but not all websites and databases improved. New listings were created and data was added and corrected on existing profiles.
The Moz Local promise is to create and correct business listings for the 4 databases and 11 websites below. If it works, the service is a no brainer. So, how did we do after 5 weeks?
Results of the Study
- All sites were flat or improved.
- Average completeness is 69%, ranging from 0% – 100%.
- Some individual listings saw large declines in completeness.
- Winners were Localeze and Yahoo, adding all listings with 98.4% and 100% completeness respectively.
- Infogroup added two listings, but four others are missing.
- No listings were created on BOTW, Factual or Yelp.
final thoughts
What’s the verdict? Too soon to say. We know that updates can take many weeks or months, but I’m feeling what our clients must feel, “Why don’t they update faster?!”. C’est la vie. It took Yahoo and Localeze a month to update, and those are our big winners thus far. We can see in the Moz Local dashboard that other updates are in progress. Complete listings on Infogroup, BOTW, Factual and Yelp would be a slam dunk. We’ll see how long those take.
If nothing else, accurate and complete syndication through Localeze, plus avoiding the nightmare that is Yahoo Local, justifies the Moz Local price. We’ll be adding more businesses this month!
Next week: Thoughts on the Moz Local tool itself.
Justifying Moz Local because of its low cost is a questionable strategy.
For me using the Moz Local tool has been an exercise in frustration.
Requiring input only via .CSV spreadsheet makes life easy on Moz developers certainly. Spending hours of one’s time attempting to upload a single site file while being chided to “read the directions” by Support is NOT gratifying. Particularly so when Moz support finally gets the memo that their .CSV input is indeed flawed.
Having the tool inform you after two months of its ministrations that you no longer have the longstanding Google or Facebook listings you began the exercise with – well, not really “priceless”.
That’s OK though compared to then doing a “Check Listings” run on another (presumably “pre-sales”) part of the site – it informs you that have no listings at all.
Given Moz’ deservedly high reputation in other areas, this tool/service is a disappointing offering.
Any chance of bringing back GetListed.org. It was a “manual” method but worked very well indeed.
Hi Dennis. I agree that the old GetListed tool was more helpful for research. I have not experienced the Google or Facebook issues you mention, but will keep an eye out for those. Good tip. It’s a new service so some issues are to be expected. We’re hopeful that our testing validates the tool. As you point out, there certainly are other options out there.
I’ve been working pretty heavily in the Local SEO space lately. I’ve been using Synup for local stuff: review management, listing management, and rankings management. The killer point for me is it’s ridiculously cheap (I like Moz for things, but it’s cost prohibitive for very small businesses).
any recent updates regarding this post? i’d love to hear about your progress?
Jason is on vacation this week, but we’ll let him know you liked his post and would like a followup.
Would love to get an update on this and hear how the results have been.
Looking at this service and wondering about any updates on the successes or failures you discovered up to this point.
Thanks for everyone’s interest. We’re working on an update. Just need to find time amid the day to day load!
We sell Listing Distribution from vendasta, and our clients get updates faster, I think. We’re at about the two month mark and the listings have all been made complete with the four data providers, now we’re just waiting for that to reach some of the other sites (about 200).
Sign up does not work and the support is helpless. I checked the values once for a customer and then convinced him to pay for it, since then I get the message “You have exceeded your rate limit. Contact help@moz.com if you believe this is an error.”
I wrote back and forth with the support and just got the answer, that the sign up only works after first doing the check first. But they can not tell me why I have exceeded the rate limit (I log in from different cafes and was even in different countries, so it can not be the IP).. Maybe its better do do it by hand after all if even the sales does not work properly.
See this post for our latest update on Moz Local:
https://twooctobers.com/2016/01/yes-moz-local-works/
I added a listing with Moz and sat back waiting for results. The problem is Moz didn’t deliver so I got back to them and they said it takes 8 to 12 weeks to see results so I waited. 13 Weeks later my score is 0%. I contacted theire customer service team and they said no refund sorry.
So a warning to anyone considering using these guys. Loads of promises that are unfounded. Avoid at your peril.
Hi Steve – Thanks for reading. I would like to learn more about your experience. We have seen strong performance with Moz. Could you email me directly? jason(at)twooctobers(com)
The update link in this article goes to a 404 error. You may want to update it to https://twooctobers.com/2016/02/yes-moz-local-works/ instead of https://twooctobers.com/2016/01/yes-moz-local-works/
Fixed, thanks for pointing that out!
Great review!
I’m using Serpstat’s $20/mo plan and Moz tools. The problem with Moz is that they give small margin of error.