Moz Local My Business Console Debuts: Quick Facts and Thoughts

Today Moz rolled out the My Business Console, as a part of the Moz Local suite of tools and resources.  Moz engineers Mark Corley and Dudley Carr gave me a tour of it the other day, and it looks useful for multi-location businesses and SEOs.

You can read the full announcement, or my TL;DR version here.

Key points:

• It’s a way to keep track of and manage who has access to your Google My Business pages.

• Because that’s only a problem for people who manage multiple locations, it’ll probably only be useful if you’ve got a multi-location business, or possibly if you’re an SEO.

• It uses the new Google My Business API.

• You don’t even need a Moz account (free or paid). It uses OAuth to sync up with whatever Google account you use to manage your My Business (AKA Places) pages.

• I’m pretty sure it works in every country.

• It’s free, and the Moz engineers tell me it will stay free.

• As a new tool, there’s room for improvement, so you should let Moz know your thoughts.

Thoughts from test drive:

• Don’t bother unless you have multiple locations.

• You’ll want to get your Google-accounts house in order before using My Business Console. It’s great if you have lots of locations and maybe even lots of managers to manage.  But if each of those managers has 5 Google accounts, and they don’t know which one to use, or you aren’t sure which one to grant access to, or if you send an invite to the wrong one, things could get muddy.

• It may take a while for Moz to authenticate your Google account, so you may be on a “loading locations” screen for a while. You may also need to refresh your browser.

• Under the “Managers” tab in the My Business Console you can which people have access to which page(s), but you can’t see those people’s email addresses. Apparently that’s a result of Google being stingy with data.

• There’s no “support” area yet, nor a way to help the less-savvy user know which Google account to use or not to use (like cockroaches, there’s never just one Google account). I’ve suggested to Mark and Dudley that Moz create an easy-to-access FAQs page.  Let me now in the comments if you agree.

Significance:

• There will be more tools like this – now that there’s the Google My Business API, which lets developers make programs that deal with Google local listings. Moz plans to introduce more.  (Yext recently rolled a different, paid offering.)

• Maybe don’t grow too reliant on it, in case Google ever kills off the My Business API.

• I’m confident the My Business Console will stay free. It’s a great lead-gen tool for Moz Local, doesn’t cost them much, and someone else can (and probably will) develop a competing tool.

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Questions?  Early feedback?

Leave a comment, so that Mark, Dudley, and other Mozzers can get your thoughts and maybe put them into action.