Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Ryan,

Just checking in with you again, wanting to be sure you saw my earlier reply. I had asked some questions to help our community get down to the heart of your query. Hope we'll hear back from you!

Hi Ruben,

So glad you've asked! Often, it's best to bring a concern like this to https://moz.com/help/contact but I'd like to answer this here in Q&A because its and FAQ for sure. There are typically 4 reasons why you may see fluctuations in the Check Listing tool:

1. One of the platforms has a bug on their side. For example, Localeze had a bug where searching for any names with multiple words turned up no results. It took them days to fix.

2. Some of our platforms change the layout of their page without proactively telling us, so we need to react to customer complaints to fix them. I believe Bing was an example here in the past.

3. It's also possible that the data we’re in the process of pushing from your paid Moz Local publishing dashboard has updated the listing, but somehow, one of the 7 supported partner sites is making it difficult to search for in their system. We are working with our partners to understand what's going on and making it more reliable. So, for example, you might see in the Moz Local publishing dash that a listing has officially updated, but Check Listing (which is a completely separate tool) may not yet show that update either because a platform has not yet pushed the data out or is making it difficult to find.

4. We do these queries in real time. Sometimes, engines can be slow and time out, and we're out of luck grabbing any data, so we assume it does not exist (thereby lowering the score).  We're making a change to differentiate between a missing listing and an API that's unavailable. We'll put as asterisk by the score and explain somewhere that the score is being impacted by unavailable partners.

We're really hoping that, in cases where an engine times out or an API is temporarily unavailable, the improvements we're working on making to the messaging customers receive will help reduce unnecessary worry. In most cases, your listings will simply reappear on their own, but if you suspect a bug because a listing stays incomplete for a long period, please do contact the Help Team,

Hope this helps!

Nice discussion going on here. To be honest, I am still unaware of any tool that does a very good job with local-specific kw info. I have never really trusted Google's numbers on this, so my rule of thumb remains to do keyword research without geomodifiers and then simply add the geomodifiers into your kw list for optimization purposes.

The one proviso here is when you are dealing with a product/service that is called totally different things in different regions (pop vs. soda vs. cola). There are many, many examples of this and it is going to require regional research (interview the business owner and staff to define local terminology) to get the terms right.

Hi SEOSarah!

If you sign up for Moz Local, we will push your data out to these 7 supported partner sites:

Infogroup

Best of the Web

Factual

Foursquare

Superpages

Acxiom

Neustar/Localeze

Any platform not on the above list, you would need to manage manually. Moz Local will either create or update your existing listings on any of the above so that they are consistent and fully filled out. We will not create duplicate listings.You cannot pick and choose which of the above 7 we would push to, but as we don't create duplicates, this shouldn't cause any problems for you.

The one exception I should mention is that if your are already having a listing managed elsewhere (such as with Localeze) we cannot take over management of it. In some cases, customers close out such listings so that we can bring them into the convenient one-stop management of the Moz Local publishing dashboard, but if you'd prefer to leave management as-is for these pre-managed listings, that's totally fine, too!

In order for us to validate your listings, you will need to have a verified, accurate Google+ Local page or Facebook local business page for each of your unique locations that you'd like to list.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!

Hi Matthew!

Good question! Best advice: build just one website and one set of citations for this business. What you are describing sounds to me (and would likely sound to Google) like a single business in a single physical location that has purchased other businesses in order to expand its menu of services.

Unless the business genuinely has unique forward-facing departments (like a hospital campus with one dept. for X-ray and another for ER) then the client would be taking a needless risk trying to promote the business as though it were 5, 6 different companies all in that same building.

Remember that Google reads street-level imaging. Should they take a look at the building's signage and see Big Guy Marketing on the sign, but see that the owner is also listing Little Guy Printing, Medium Guy Car Wraps and Funny Guy Graphics in his Google My Business dashboard all in that same building, Google would rightly have cause to be suspicious that they are being spammed, by a single marketing company trying to look like multiple businesses.

The good news here is that the owner is already wishing to consolidate. He should do so, and then you and he can both focus on building out one really awesome brand with a powerful, diverse menu of services (but just one set of citations)!

Hope this helps!

Hi SEOSarah,

There are no limits! Add as many locations as you like - and the nice thing is that you can enter them all in one .CSV file and you'll be able to manage them all from a single dashboard. Pretty nifty:)

So happy to have you in the community, Donna

Hi RustMedia!

When you submit your listing, Moz Local attempts to validate it against both the Google+ Local page and Facebook Place page. If we can only find one of these, then that it the only one we will reference if errors/issues occur. If, in the present instance, you know that your Google+ Local listing is wrong and we are not referencing that we are finding a Facebook Place page, then this may be caused by a variety of issues, including:

1. The Facebook listing is of the wrong type. It must be a Facebook Place (not a social page).

2. There may be some setting on the Facebook page that is preventing us from seeing it, like an age restriction setting or something along those lines.

3. The Facebook page is too new for us to see it.

Those are some common reasons. If you would like private troubleshooting of your issue, please start a Help ticket at:

https://moz.com/help/contact

Choose 'Account' as your topic.

Hope this helps!

Hi Lee!

I agree with you that it makes good horse sense to craft unique citation descriptions, but to be pragmatic about this, the past 5 years have seen the development of citation building services (Moz Local, Whitespark, Yext) etc. and, normally, these services are going to push out a single description for you, and that description is then going to make its way further down the stream to platforms higher level platforms push to. In other words, duplication of descriptions isn't only an outcome of using most citation building services, but is pretty much baked into the situation in which data upstream moves downstream.

So - if there is a specific platform on which you feel having an extra unique description might help (like, maybe a Yelp profile), go ahead and write one, but, at this point in the game, I'm honestly no longer worried about duplicate citation descriptions, given that they are pretty much unavoidable.

Hi Corey,

For SABs like your client, a typical marketing strategy is going to involve:

1. Citation building for their physical location (whether manually or more conveniently through a product like Moz Local

2. Other efforts (like content development) for their service cities where they have no physical presence.

So, you'll want to do both. Moz Local will help your client get solid citations built for their physical location (which is really important, of course!) but you'll need to then employ other strategies to earn visibility for their non-physical-location cities.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi There!

We had a thread about Wix websites and their issues a few years back. I've found it for you:

https://moz.com/community/q/wix-is-it-any-good-for-seo

Hope it helps!

Hey There!

I'm glad you've asked about this. From your description, it sounds to me like you may not actually be running the 'right' type of Facebook page for the businesses in question. Moz Local validates against Facebook Place pages only - not social/brand-type pages. In order for validation to succeed, you would need to have a unique Facebook Place for each of business locations. Facebook Place pages can typically be identified by the fact that they have:

• Reviews

• A map

• Complete name, address, phone number, website

• Visits (not just likes)

If you discover that you need to change the type of Facebook page for a business, you can investigate this directly with Facebook by going to:

https://www.facebook.com/help/343548832389235/

Click on the heading ‘How do I add a map or address to my page?’ to see Facebook’s guidelines for changing the type of page.

Alternatively, we can validate against a Google+ Local/Google My Business page, instead of Facebook, but likewise, each location will need to have a unique page, and the pages must be postcard-verified with Google in order for us to see them.

Hope this helps. If you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to ask. If you need to show me the Facebook page in question, and don't want to post it publicly, you can PM me. You can also start a ticket at our Help Hub for private assistance.

That's right, Kuldeep Singh!

Each physical locations should have it's own GMB listing and will earn its own reviews.

Hi Calico:)

Of the 7 partners in our network, Foursquare is the one that requires that you take an extra step, via the Moz Local dashboard, of authenticating the listing. You would do so by clicking the 'Foursquare Authentication' tab in the left navigation menu of the Moz Local dashboard and the following the steps from there. Is this what you did, or are you saying that you did something else? Please let me know!

Hey Ricky!

I would say this boils down to how well that directory ranks for your client's core search terms. $50 is quite a bit to ask for a listing, you know, but if there is some reason being ranked on this directory in this town would help your client earn rankings they can't get on their own, it might be worth it. So, do some searches to discover how authoritative the directory is.

Hi Scott!

The best way to differentiate practitioners in the multi-practitioner scenario is to aim for as many of these as you can:

1. Put only the doctor's name in the business title. So, Dr. John Johnson - not Dr. John Johnson, Greentree Dental

2. If possible, list a unique phone number for each doctor/dentist at which he/she is directly contactable. I know this isn't always possible, but if it is, it can reduce the risk of merging.

3. Do not share Google My Business categories between the practitioners. If possible, divide the chosen categories between the practitioners.

4. Set up a unique landing page on the website for each practitioner and point the Google+ Local page to it, instead of pointing them all to the homepage. Be sure the complete contact info for the practitioner is on this page and the content is unique.

5. Write a unique Google+ Local description for each practitioner.

All of these precautions can help reduce the chances of accidental merges and duplications.

Hope this helps!

Hi Patrick,

As each of these is genuinely a forward-facing department with its own phone number, then listing each should not be regarded by Google as spam in any way. Many hospitals and colleges have numerous departments. It's true - this will lead to quite a cluster of markers on the map, but if customers zoom in, Google will spread them out. Hope this helps!

Hi Kris!

Moz Local pushes to the 5 major US aggregators + 2 other important platforms. The complete list of our 7 partners is:

Infogroup

Localeze

Best of the Web

Superpages

Factual

Foursquare

Acxiom

As others have mentioned, Yelp is not currently one of our partners, so that would be a listing you'd want to manage manually.

Moz Local provides a little bit of a different service than Yext, by updating the core data aggregators that the primary local search engines rely on for their baseline data.

Please, let me know if I can answer any further questions for you!

Hey James!

Joy Hawkins wrote an excellent post on this topic last year. Check it out:

http://searchengineland.com/business-owners-guide-moving-office-234671

Should be just what the doctor ordered!

Hi Muskrat & Tiffeny,

Thanks for bringing this up. Our category recommendations should be taken as a general guide, particularly in regards to Google. Google's guidelines specifically state that they want you to use the fewest possible categories (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en). So, important to remember here that the Moz Local score is not as important as the accuracy and guideline compliance of your actual business listings. Right now, we have a category minimum of just 3 categories set for Google, so if you've added that many, it's just a matter of waiting for Google to push that data out so that our tool can pick it up and reflect it, improving your score.

Hope this helps!