How do I measure the results of my local spam crackdown?

[DigitalMarketingSEO]

I've recently been cracking down on some spammy listings. How do I measure the success? Can I only do so with a third party tool like Moz?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

Applause from me for trying to do your part to crack down on spam listings. What, specifically, are you hoping to track? Ranking shifts? Something else? Please, share as much as you can. Thanks!

[DigitalMarketingSEO]

This post is deleted!

[DigitalMarketingSEO]

I would love to track ranking shifts. I'm thinking that while I may be appearing on the first page of Google Maps, I may be right under SpammyListing 1 and SpammyListing 2. I'm not sure how to prove that my edit drove them down though, and as a result, pushed me up.

[MiriamEllis]

Got it! Thanks for the further details.

Now, if you're a Moz Local customer at the Professional level, you can sync up your GMB listing to your Moz Local dashboard and we'd show you month by month gains your listing was making in terms of impressions and cool KPIs like clicks-to-call, clicks-to-website and clicks-for-directions, but when it comes to absolute proof that your edits resulted in a reordering of the results, I'm not aware of a tool that would offer such proof. The problem is, your edits could be responsible for pack movement, but ranking changes can occur for so many reasons, like a Google update, a guideline violation, a competitor doing a better or worse job building authority or links. So, to say, "I did this and, presto, the rankings were affected," has to be more of a hypothesis than a provable fact, because there are just too many variables at play. What if the pack was partly impacted by what you did, but also partly impacted by the fact that a competitor just had malware show up on their website? You can't really track all those aspects.

So, whether you take screenshots on a daily basis to track ranking changes, use analytics like Moz Pro, or are looking at the data in the Moz Local dashboard, I believe the best you can come up with is a theory, rather than absolute proof.

If anyone in the community has another solution or suggestion, please share with us!