Location is Everything: Local Rankings Now in Moz Analytics

[Linda Buquet]

Ever since David Mihm joined Moz, I've been waiting for them to come out with more Local Search tools. Of course there is Moz Local which is awesome and a big development, but I was wondering when they would add more location features to their existing Analytics.

Looks like that's starting to happen. Here is the announcement with a teaser of more local goodness to come!

<a href="http://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics">Location is Everything: Local Rankings in Moz Analytics - Moz</a>

Today we are thrilled to launch local rankings as a feature in Moz Analytics, which gives our customers the ability to assign geo-locations to their tracked keywords. If you're a Moz Analytics customer and are ready to jump right in, here's where you an find the new feature within the application...

We can now return rankings based on a location you specify, just like I set my search to Portland in the example above. This is critical for monitoring the health of your local search campaigns, as Google continues to fold the location layer into the organic results. Here's how it looks in Moz Analytics...

What's next?

We will be launching local rankings functionality within the Moz Local application in the first part of 2015, which will provide needed visibility to folks who are mainly concerned with Local SEO. We're also working on functionality to allow users to easily add geo-modifiers to their tracked keywords, so we can provide rankings for "health club Des Moines" alongside tracking rankings for "health clubs" in the 50301 zip code.

Right now this feature works with all Google engines (we'll be adding Bing and Yahoo! later). We'll also be keeping tabs on Google's advancements on the local front so we can provide our customers with the best data on their local visibility.

Above are just some snippets, so head over to read the rest and see the screenshots.

 

[anim8tr]

It's too bad they don't provide local keyword tracking in their Moz Local tool. I'm sure they're hoping to lure more people to their much higher priced Moz Analytics tool, but to me it makes more sense to include this functionality in their Moz Local tool.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Has anyone used this yet? I would like to hear a comparison on this tool vs Places Scout. Right now, I feel like there just isn't a tool out there better than Places Scout.

Also, does anyone know of a free rank tracker out there that's pretty simple? I don't mind paying for Places Scout but small business owners many times run a ranking report maybe twice a year. Does anyone have a solution for them?

 

[Joe Mink]

According to the article it looks like they will add local rankings to Moz Local in 2015:

"We will be launching local rankings functionality within the Moz Local application in the first part of 2015, which will provide needed visibility to folks who are mainly concerned with Local SEO."

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Joe so much for that.

I was going to reply to anim8tr with the same thing last week but the move tied me up in knots and never got it done.

 

[Laustin1878]

I just started playing with the local tracking tool in Moz Pro tools. I just added a number of keywords but it takes a few days for them to return results.

I added broad terms as well as terms with geo-identifirers along with selecting a few locales. I am not sure how to best add the terms meaning, just leaving broad terms or terms with geo-identifiers while using the locale. We'll see how it shapes up and I'll report back.

 

[Tim Colling]

I gave it a try. I did a new "30-day trial" found that it did seem to work, at least, it reported different visitor counts.

however, it also uses one "keyword" credit for every keyword-and-location combination that you choose. Since Moz doesn't give you very many keywords to begin with, unless you pay more, it just burns up those keywords all the more quickly.

I cancelled the moz trial after a couple of weeks. I think it's not worth it. your mileage may vary. With Semrush you can track far more keywords, and you can do the tracking at a local level if you wish.

Semrush is still not as mature as moz, but I think its a better value, at least just from a tools standpoint. There may be other virtues there like forums that you can't get to without a paid subscription or something, I'm not sure about that sort of thing.

 

[Laustin1878]

however, it also uses one "keyword" credit for every keyword-and-location combination that you choose. Since Moz doesn't give you very many keywords to begin with, unless you pay more, it just burns up those keywords all the more quickly.

I cancelled the moz trial after a couple of weeks. I think it's not worth it. your mileage may vary. With Semrush you can track far more keywords, and you can do the tracking at a local level if you wish.

I agree, it is definitely a short fall in Moz with the keyword credits. Hopefully future enhancements of the tool will eliminate the keyword credit situation.

I find it to be a very useful tool. It's kinda pricey but I think the information is quite in-depth and valuable. There is almost too many options on there. I do find myself getting lost. The local keyword tracking just adds to it for me.

I may give SEMrush a spin to see what it's like. The good thing is you tried it and found it didnt suit your needs.

 

[Tim Colling]

Moz is definitely an interesting toolset. I just find that I could spend all day (and all my money) on tools if I'm not careful to set boundaries. For me, in my small niche practice, I don't think I need as many tools as there are out there to buy.

I find that I mostly rely upon:

Majestic
Semrush
Google Analytics
Google WMT
BuzzStream (kind of on the bubble with this one, though)

I'm probably forgetting a few right now.

The ones that I have foregone for the sake of time and cost are:

Ahrefs
Moz
Raven (I really wanted to like this but I just didn't)
A bunch of the SERP rank tracking tools

 

[Tim Colling]

One more type of tool or service that I forgot to mention: citation building or management. So far, I'm not very optimistic.

I have tried Yext and no longer use it. I won't go into details, since they are a sponsor here and I want to be polite to them.

I have used Moz Local and they're not bad, for what they do, but they are VERY slow to fix problems and they don't detect problems without my pointing them out. ("VERY slow" = months. <sigh>)

I have tried one well-known citation building service recently and the results are not yet complete. The service took 60 days to get started instead of the 30 days that were promised. Once they got started, it only took them a few weeks. However, now my client has been a bit slow on cooperating with the last parts of the process, so the project isn't yet complete and the jury, as they say, is still out. I still have hope for this to be a good choice but the rocky start was a bad surprise. To be fair, the vendor immediately gave me a 20% refund when I asked about the delay.

Tonight I have been checking out another well-known service and the results don't look promising. After I did a lot of work entering my client's NAP and other info, they produced a report saying that the top three issues were that the client has no citations on Google+, Apple Maps or Bing.

That's just plain wrong. There are valid citations for the client on all three of those directories.

Too bad, I had hoped that they could be a useful vendor. I don't think that they were deliberately misleading me just to drum up business. I'm afraid, though, that they're not competent and so I can't trust them.

This shouldn't be so hard...