Moz Product Updates & New Features

Moz Local Lite, Preferred, and Elite subscribers in Canada will now have a stronger online presence with the addition of Yellow Pages Canada (yp.ca) to their Moz Local accounts. Yp.ca has a mission to connect small and medium businesses with people across Canada. Their solutions are another tool to help businesses achieve their goals. Yp.ca will make the business listing information received via Moz Local available to their customers and visitors.

Interested in Moz Local? Learn more about the plans and features on our website or visit our Help Hub.

We're excited to announce that new metrics and insights are coming to the Moz Local dashboard. The Moz Local team has been hard at work integrating Google’s new Business Profile (GBP) Performance API which replaces their previous GBP Insights API. More data = more insights for you to understand how your prospects and customers are finding and interacting with your data in Google local search.

In comparison to the old Insights API, the new Business Profile Performance API provides valuable insights on metrics that weren’t tracked before, such as

• Search keywords: See the keywords that led people to your listings (new keyword tracking ideas!)

• Bookings: See the number of users who selected the Bookings option

• Food orders: View the number of users who selected the Food orders option (for restaurants)

• Conversations: See the number of users who utilized the conversation/chat option

• Impressions by device: Track the number of business map and search impressions/views differentiated between desktop and mobile devices
  

The new Business Profile Performance API will provide the same metrics as the old Insights API did, except for the following metrics:

• Direct, indirect, and chain (branded) queries

• Local post metrics (for those with social posting in your plan)

• Local photos metrics

Google is no longer providing these metrics so you won’t see updates to data starting February 20, 2023, on. This will affect the Dashboard and Analytics sections that are partially using this data. You will continue to see historical data on those metrics within the existing graphs and tables. We encourage you to export historical data that is of value to you.

While there is no one-to-one solution to access the metrics that will be deprecated, there are still ways you can approximate those insights.

For volume and types of queries:

With the Google Business Profile Performance API, Google is moving to provide data that is more tangible and actionable. Businesses will be able to see the most commonly used keywords and phrases they get found with. The data is more specific and businesses can segment it by types of searched phrases (such as branded, non-branded, address info, products, etc.).

Historically, the queries that Google reported on with the Insights API were broad metrics and best used to directionally understand how and when your business was displayed to searchers.

Additionally, if you are leveraging an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, you can add tracking parameters to your local URLs in your Google Business Profiles. This way you can capture the search and traffic volumes being driven by them. One of our favorite resources for adding tracking parameters to your listings can be found here.

For Google Post performance metrics:

Google will no longer be providing views or clicks data on Google posts. Businesses can continue to add tracking parameters to the CTA on the post. While this won't report on total views, you'll be able to see engagement from each post on Google to help inform your content strategy.

For photos metrics:

Google will no longer provide insights for photos within GBP. As far as we know, they will continue to rank and display the most popular photos at the top of your profiles. You can always review which photos are displayed first to get an idea of the photos customers are most influenced by. We also recommend adding alt tags to your images to help describe these to search engines and accessibility tools.

Moz Local Lite, Preferred, and Elite subscribers in the US and Canada will now have their business listing information published to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) via the Moz Local dashboard. The Better Business Bureau has empowered people to find businesses, brands, and charities they can trust for over 110 years. In 2021, people turned to BBB more than 200 million times for BBB Business Profiles on 6.3 million businesses. The BBB will make the business listing information received via Moz Local available to their 100 local chapter offices, who in turn will import the data and publish it on the Better Business Bureau site.

Interested in Moz Local? Learn more about the plans and features on our website.

New to Moz Local, Amazon Alexa and MapQuest are now available in the Lite, Preferred, and Elite plans. Subscribers on these plans will now have their business listings submitted directly to these directories in the US, UK and Canada.

With Amazon Alexa, Moz Local has the four major voice search assistants, making it that much easier for your business to be found by consumers regardless of the device they use, whether at home or on-the-go. With MapQuest, Moz Local subscribers get another popular online mapping service along with Moz Local’s current pool of mapping, navigation, and GPS directories.

For more about the various directories in each Moz Local plan, check out our Help Hub. Learn more about our current Moz Local plans here.