Meet Moz Local Search Insights. The company says the new tool is designed to provide businesses with a comprehensive understanding of their local search presence.
In an email interview with Small Business Trends, Dudley Carr, VP of Engineering at Moz, said, “Moz Local Insights is unique in how it helps a business look at local data. For each piece of data, we distill the data across all of your locations into a single, meaningful number. Moz Local Insights then breaks those numbers down to provide more detail into what’s driving those metrics.”
Delivering these metrics requires understanding locations, and for small businesses looking to get a return on their local search efforts, Moz Local Insights provides business analytics that allows companies to see how they are doing compared to local competitors for relevant search keywords.
By looking at performance data coming from Google Analytics, Google My Business, ranking metrics from Google search and reviews from sites like Yelp that have the potential to show in your search result, Moz Local Insights measures the metrics with the most impact as they relate to your local search marketing efforts.
Carr said, “It is going to give local businesses the most holistic picture of their digital marketing.”
The value of local search is also highlighted by Google in its research paper, “Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior.” It said, “Local searches lead to more purchases than non-local searches. Eighteen percent of local searches on smartphone lead to a purchase within a day verses 7 percent of non-local searches.”
When Moz announced the beta release, Director of Local Search Strategy David Mihm said, this platform is, “The hub for analyzing your location-centric digital activity.” Because it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep up with the disparate sources where this data appears.
The beta release has features driven by customers. Everyone from agencies to enterprise brands had some input in how to improve the platform, and Moz made great efforts to incorporate those suggestions.
When you access a location or multiple locations in your account, or locations you have tagged with custom labels, you see daily-updated reporting in three key areas: location page performance, SERP rankings and reputation.
Location Page Performance
According to Moz, this section refines the metrics from online traffic that is most important to brick- and-mortar businesses into a single screen. It breaks down the traffic by percentages, sources by device type and a list of local directories sending potential customers to your website.
Mihm said, “While we haven’t yet integrated impression data from these directories, this should give you a relative indicator of customer engagement on each. We’re hoping to add even more performance metrics, including Google My Business and other primary consumer destinations, as they become available.”
Visibility
The Visibility section has the reports of the rankings focused on location. The metrics it provides include performance in local packs and organic results. Just as the scoring system in Moz Analytics, Mihms said they have combined rankings into a single metric for both types of results to reflect the likelihood that a searcher will click on a result for your business when searching a given keyword.
It also lets you compare up to three competitors at a time to see how your business is faring. You can choose any competitor with granular visibility based on analysis by keyword, locations, average local rank, average organic rank and visibility score.
Reputation
The Reputation section shows the progress of your review of acquisition efforts in terms of volume and the ratings that people are leaving for your business. This includes a distribution of where people are leaving reviews. Based on this information, a business can identify the sites that need more attention and take action with better marketing, etc.
This section will have more features to include more review sources, sentiment analysis and notifications and summaries of new reviews.
Even when we decide to patronize a multi-national company with presence in many countries around the world, our decision is based on the quality of the product locally. And for local businesses, the available technology in the market place, such as Moz Local Search Insights, can provide solutions that highlight the value of place in their marketing mix with great results.
Search Insights is enabled for all Moz Local customers by default.
Image: Moz
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