If you use MOZ to identify GMB Categories – just stop it.
In a recent exchange with MOZ (below) about the lack of what I considered a primary business category for GMB listings (Google My Business) in their MOZ Local Category Research tool, I received the following response.
“That said, Moz Local’s categories are pretty out of sync with Google’s categories. We do draw in our categories directly from them, but at this point, we know that they have more and more specific categories than our tool has, and our engineers have had a lot of trouble trying to keep up. That means that there are a lot of specific or more niche categories, like ‘Facility Management’ that just don’t exist in our tool.” ~Moz
In their own words, MOZ is woefully “out of sync with Google’s categories” index.
I use the tool often for cross-platform business category research, and suspect many others do as well. Google seems to be changing the GMB category list too quickly for MOZ engineers to keep up with. This confession not likely to be welcomed by MOZ Local subscribers, or users of the free tool.
The best solution for business category identification remains to search for it directly from an existing citation. If there’s another tool similar to this, feel free (please!) to list it in the comments.
As With Anything SEO, Hard Work Often Produces The Best Results! Dig In.
#bravebytes #mozlocal #moz
