by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 18, 2016
Nearly one third of all Google searches show local intent, and 76% of people who search on their smartphone visit a business within a day. Search marketers that have heard those numbers repeatedly now have an opportunity to capitalize on services that support local search and paid search.
Accurate information in directories and reviews will feed data to machines that connect to the Internet, especially information used for local listings.
“Marketers understand that marketing investments can fail if consumers don’t have the information to move from online searches to offline purchases in stores,” said Mark Corley, VP of Moz Local. In this scenario, he said, “location data becomes the competitive asset.”
Active location management involves not just having the ability to send the information into the Web, but having the ability to use it consistently and verify information in directories and sites.
So Moz Local created a new features for those platforms. Google My Business Sync synchronizes listing information between Moz Local and Google My Business, allowing businesses to create and manage local listing information directly from the Moz Local Dashboard. Then any changes automatically synchronize information between the two systems.
“The plumbing finally is coming into place,” said Dudley Carr, chief product officer at Moz Local.
Moz Local’s platform also now supports Listing Alerts in a new Activity feed, so if information like store hours or a phone number changes in the main director file to something that doesn’t match the original listing information, protecting the customers from data conflation.
And finally, since reputation and recommendations will become even more important as screens disappear in platforms like Google Home and Amazon Alexis, Moz Local allows marketers to monitor Google reviews in the dashboard. It adds reputation monitoring to existing monitoring of reviews on CitySearch, Foursquare, SuperPages, YellowPages and Yelp.
Marketers can see new reviews in the platform’s notification center as they are published, allowing for immediate response by the brand or retailer to comments left by consumers.
MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily
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