Everything You Need to Know About the Latest Moz Local Updates

If you own (or handle marketing for) a small- or medium-sized business, then chances are you’re pretty familiar with local SEO—and you may also be familiar with Moz Local. If not, here are the quick-and-dirty details: Moz Local is a user-friendly local SEO tool that helps search engine crawlers and users find your business online by making sure your company’s NAP information is complete and consistent on any and all business listings across the web.

If you’ve used Moz Local before, you already know that it takes a lot of the work out of manually completing or updating NAP citations for your company. But today, Moz announced updates to the platform that are going to make managing your local SEO even easier.

Let’s delve into these new updates* and what they mean for users.

You Can Now Sync Your Google My Business Account

Before, Moz Local verified your business address by associating it with the address listed on your Google My Business profile, which is why your address was un-editable within Moz Local after being marked “Verified by Google.” If you wanted to change your address in Moz Local so that it could be properly pushed out to your company’s listing across the web, you had to first change the address in your Google My Business profile, wait for your Moz Local profile to reflect the new address you added in Google My Business, and then you could update your listings across the web.

But thanks to this update, that’s no longer the case! Now, Moz will automatically associate your Google My Business listing with your Moz Local listing, so the two will be synced—meaning that if you make any changes in Moz Local, it will sync those changes on your Google My Business profile. This new feature is particularly helpful because having accurate, up-to-date NAP information in your Google My Business profile is crucial if you want to rank in the Local Pack.

So, you don’t have to manage your address on two different platforms anymore! In fact, if you don’t want to, you’ll never have to log into your Google My Business profile again; you can just handle everything from one central location. Or, if you prefer logging into Google My Business, you can just make your changes there and they’ll automatically sync in Moz Local as well. Boom. Easy peasy, lemon squeeze-y.

You’ll Now Get Alerts Every Time Your Listings Are Updated

We can all agree that Google is basically an all-knowing, all-powerful being, right? Right. So, sometimes, Google will change your business information out of no where because it thinks it has found some more up-to-date information. Google may then go around updating things like store hours or categories without any warning, and you might not notice until it becomes an inconvenience (i.e. you start missing after-hours phone calls or customers begin reaching out for services you don’t offer). Then you have to take reactive steps to find the source of the misinformation and update it, which can be a hassle.

Thankfully, listing alerts are here to change all of that. Now, every time that your listing is updated in any way, you’ll get a notification in your Activity feed telling you what changes have been made. This allows you to take proactive action if any updates need to be made, instead of waiting for some irritated, misinformed customer to call you about incorrectly listed hours or categories on your profiles. Way to help us all prevent complaints from annoyed customers, Moz Local!

You Can Now Monitor Your Reviews All In One Place

Since reviews are now becoming even more important in terms of local search rankings for businesses, you can now see and monitor your reviews from around the web, all within the Moz Local platform. In terms of your Google My Business reviews, you’ll be able to both monitor AND respond to new reviews from Moz Local directly. For the other platforms (like Foursquare, Yelp, and more), Moz Local will provide direct links to each individual review left on that platform, so you can click through straight to the review itself and respond as quickly as possible. Moz will even send you a notification when you get a review so that you know you’ve got some new feedback to read and respond to!

Responding to reviews (whether positive or negative!) is something that you should already be doing, since it affects consumers’ perception of your business and its “online reputation.” And now this Moz Local update will make it even easier for you to stay on top of responding to all of the 5-star praise that’s hopefully coming at your business from all around the internet!

Still Sound Like Too Much to Handle? Don’t Worry, We Can Help!

We get it: local SEO is constantly evolving and changing, and it’s hard to stay on top of all of these new tools and trends when you’re busy running your business! That’s why we created this simple guide to NAP consistency to help you improve your company’s local SEO. You can download this FREE 7-step guide here:

Or, even easier, we can just take this job off of your hands! We’re here to help you get more customers in your service area by improving your local search rankings. Ready to get started? Contact us online today! 

*While we’ve provided details about these updates and our thoughts on why they’ll be useful, you can also find the original information straight from Moz Local here.