When we launched Moz Local, I said at the time that one of the primary goals of our product team was to “help business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.” Today we take a major step forward towards that goal with the beta release of Moz Local Search Insights, the foundation for a holistic understanding of your local search presence.
As we move into an app-centric world that’s even more dependent on structured, accurate location data than the mobile web, it’s getting harder to keep up with the disparate sources where this data appears — and where customers are finding your business. Enter Moz Local Insights — the hub for analyzing your location-centric digital activity.
What’s included in this beta release?
We’ve heard our customers loud and clear — especially those at agencies and enterprise brands — that while enhanced reporting was a major improvement, they needed a more comprehensive way to prove the value of their efforts to clients and company locations.
We start with daily-updated reporting in three key areas with this release: Location page performance, SERP rankings, and reputation. All of these are available not only within a single location view, but aggregated across all locations in your account, or by locations you’ve tagged with our custom labels.
Location page performance
The goal of our new Performance section is to distill the online traffic metrics that matter most to brick-and-mortar businesses into a single digestible screen. After a simple two-click authentication of your Google Analytics account, you’ll see a breakdown of your traffic sources by percentage:
Clicking into each of the traffic sources on the righthand side will show you the breakdown of traffic from those sources by device type.
There’s also an ordered list of all prominent local directories that are sending potential customers to your website. 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 houses your location-focused ranking reports, with a breakdown of how well you’re performing, both in local packs and in organic results. Similar to the visibility score in Moz Analytics, we’ve combined your rankings across both types of results into a single metric that’s designed to reflect the likelihood that a searcher will click on a result for your business when searching a given keyword.
The Visibility section also lets you see how you stack up against your competitors — up to three at a time. But rather than preselecting a particular competitor, you can choose any competitor you’d like to compare yourself to on the fly.
And, of course, we give you the metrics in full table view below (CSV export coming soon) if you prefer to get a little more granular with your visibility analysis by keyword.
We’ve got a number of other innovative features planned for release later in the beta period, including taking barnacle positions into account (originally heard through Will Scott) when calculating your visibility score, and tracking additional knowledge panel and universal search entries that are appearing for your keywords.
Reputation
The Reputation section is probably the most straightforward of the bunch — a simple display of how your review acquisition efforts are progressing, both in terms of volume and the ratings that people are leaving for your business.
There’s also a distribution of where people are leaving reviews, so you have a sense of what sites your customers are leaving reviews on, and which ones might need a little extra TLC.
Over time, we’ll be expanding this section to include many more review sources, sentiment analysis, and the ability to receive notifications and summaries of new reviews.
What’s next?
You tell us! This is a true beta, and we’ll be paying close attention to your feedback over the next couple of months.
Search Insights is already enabled for all Moz Local customers by default. Just log in to your dashboard and let us know what you think. And if you’re not yet a Moz Local customer, sign up today to take Search Insights for a free spin during our beta period.
There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure beneath the surface of this release that will allow us to add new features on a modular basis moving forward, and we’re already working on improvements, such as custom date range selection, CSV exporting, emailed reports, and notifications. But your feedback will help us prioritize and add new features to the roadmap.
Before I sign off, I want to give a huge thank you to our engineering, design and UX, marketing, and community teams for their hard work, assistance, and patience as we worked to release Moz Local Search Insights into the wild. And most importantly, thank you to you guys — our customers — whose feedback has already proven invaluable and will be even more so as we enter the newest phase of Moz Local!
