Whitespark or Moz Local

[wseabrook]

Hello all,

We can't use Moz Local as we're in the UK. Tempted to use Whitespark, but not quite sure what the differences are between the two.

Also, can a website design / digital marketing agency be considered to be a local business - in Googles eyes?

Thanks!
William

[Whitespark]

Hey  William,

First, I'd like to mention that I am Nyagoslav (of Whitespark), and not Darren, but I am using his account to reply I know that my comment would be biased, no matter how hard I try for it not to be, and it is important that you view it as such. Here is an answer I recently gave to a very similar question (advantages/disadavantages of Yext, Moz Local, and Whitespark Citation Audit & Clean-up):

here are some general notes and Q&As that might help in your decision making. Of course all the decision making should also be made on case-by-case basis, but I will base my notes on the case(s) you described in your original post.

1. Will each of these services take care of all of your duplicate listings, or listings that feature incorrect, outdated, or fake information that should be removed?

Both Moz Local and Yext are uni-linear, automation-based systems. This means that they will, in general, find and fix one listing per website (with the note that they cover only the websites that are part of their networks). They offer different types of add-ons that could deal with duplicates, but additional manual work on your end would be required, i.e. you would need to help them find the duplicates. I have personally had negative experience specifically with the duplicate suppression process of Yext. A few of our clients have had active Yext subscriptions at the time they signed up for our citation clean-up or general local <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> services. That is why I seeked the help of Yext's support to try and get rid of some of the duplicate listings on the sites that are part of their network (note: some of the subscriptions had been active for more than 2 years, but there were still tens of duplicate listings on the sites part of Yext's network). Unfortunately, in almost all of the cases I had absolutely no success going through Yext's support and that is why I did the duplicate clean-ups manually.

2. Will each of these services cover all of the important bases that would need to be covered in terms of citation auditing and clean-up?

The important bases could tentatively be divided in the following categories:

• Data aggregators (ExpressUpdate, Acxiom, Localeze, Factual)
• Important top-level search platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Apple Maps)
• Most important citation sources (the likes of YP, Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages)
• Most important secondary citation sources (the likes of MerchantCircle, MojoPages, Kudzu)

Yext cover:

• Factual + they do have some relationship with ExpressUpdate, but as far as I understand it is available only for some users
• Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Some of the most important secondary citation sources

Moz Local cover:

• All the data aggregators
• Google + Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Basically none of the secondary citation sources

Our service covers:

• All the data aggregators
• All the important top-level search platforms
• All the most important citation sources (except for WhitePages and their network, which is monopolized by Yext)
• All the most important secondary citation sources

3. What is the cost and sustainability of the service?

Moz Local: $84/year
Yext: $500 to $1,000/year
Our service: $750 (one time)

I have previously done a case study on what happens when one cancels their Yext subscription. You could find it here.

4. What would be your time involvement and time until work is done?

With Yext, the information should be distributed instantly or near-instantly across their network. With Moz Local, as far as I know, it takes a few hours. With our service it takes about 1 month, as it is a manual process.

It would take you approximately 15 minutes to get set up on Yext or Moz Local. Your involvement would be about 30 minutes overall with our service.

Regarding your second question - historically web design firms have had problems getting local presence on Google (Google Maps/Places/Plus Local). However, this changed a few months ago. Please check this article for reference.

I hope this helps!

Nyagoslav

[MiriamEllis]

Hi William,

So sorry Moz Local can't be in the running for serving a non-US-based business. Nyagoslav has given you a good rundown - I do want to be clear that our duplicate finder app can be really helpful in closing out duplicates on our network partner platforms, but I'm sorry our service doesn't currently support the UK.

For international citation building, the 2 most highly-spoken of services in the Local SEO world tend to be either Whitespark or BrightLocal. I would suggest you check out the features of both to see which is the most ideal match for your needs.

[MaryBowling]

I recently discovered that Moz Local does not distribute data to Yahoo!Local.

[P-C-A]

Hi - I have a few questions about Whitespark.

Once the initial cleanup is complete & your listing(s) are propagated throughout the local ecosystem, what if updates to listings need to be made in the future?  Is there one central place to make them?  If so, are there additional fees to make future updates?

Also,  is there an easy way to manage multiple listings? Right now, that's what's making me lean more towards MozLocal - easy to update multiple locations at once as often as necessary (thinking hours, descriptions, etc. vs. NAP).

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Mary!

Nice to see you here! That's correct - Yahoo is not currently one of our supported Network Partners. Our 7 supported partners to whom we currently push data are:

Infogroup

Neustar/Localeze

Acxiom

Superpages

Factual

Foursquare

Best of the Web

We'll hope to expand our network in future, but for now, this is the list:)

[wseabrook]

This is great - thanks Nyagoslav!

[wseabrook]

Thank you Miriam