Posted by David-Mihm
One of the most consistent refrains from the Moz community as we've released features over the last two years has been the desire to see Moz Local expand to countries outside the U.S. Today I'm pleased to announce that we're embarking on our journey to global expansion with support for U.K. business listing searches in our Check Listing tool.
Some of you may remember limited U.K. functionality as part of GetListed.org, but as a very small company we couldn't keep up with the maintenance required to present reliable results. It's taken us longer than we would have liked to get here, but now with more resources, the Moz Local team has the bandwidth and important experience from the past year of Moz Local in the U.S. to fully support U.K. businesses.
How It Works
We've updated our search feature to accept both U.S. and U.K. postal codes, so just head on over to moz.com/local/search to check it out!
After entering the name of your business and a U.K. postcode, we go out and ping Google and other important local search sites in the U.K., and return what we found. Simply select the closest-matching business and we'll proceed to run a full audit of your listings across these sites.
You can click through and discover incomplete listings, inconsistent NAP information, duplicate listings, and more.
This check listing feature is free to all Moz community members.
You've no doubt noted in the screenshot above that we project a listing score improvement. We do plan to release a fully-featured U.K. version of Moz Local later this spring (with the same distribution, reporting, and duplicate-closure features that are available in the U.S.), and you can enter your email address—either on that page or right here—to be notified when we do!
U.K.-Specific Partners
As I've mentioned in previous blog comments, there are a certain number of global data platforms (Google, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, Foursquare, and Factual, among others) where it's valuable to be listed correctly and completely no matter which country you're in.
But every country has its own unique set of domestically relevant players as well, and we're pleased to have worked with two of them on this release: Central Index and Thomson Local. (Head on over to the Moz Local Learning Center for more information about country-specific data providers.)
We're continuing discussions with a handful of other prospective data partners in the U.K. If you're interested in working with us, please let us know!
What's Next?
Requests for further expansion, especially to Canada and Australia, I'm sure will be loud and clear in the comments below! Further expansion is on our roadmap, but it's balanced against a more complete feature set in the (more populous) U.S. and U.K. markets. We'll continue to use our experience in those markets as we prioritize when and where to expand next.
A few lucky members of the Moz Local team are already on their way to BrightonSEO. So if you're attending that awesome event later this week, please stop by our booth and let us know what you'd like to see us work on next.
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