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<< Environmental NZPHP Tutor >> Today's post takes a look at Local Moa - a fairly new local search service for finding stuff near you. Local Moa is a New Zealand search facility that brings up the results on a map.




Above: Local Moa - a local search engine with map-based results. And lots of lime green.

Potentially this sort of thing could be quite useful - Google often is no good for finding local bricks and mortar businesses, because they often don't have a website (or don't know how to optimise their website). We have a local Thai food place up the road, which does great Thai food and is well priced. I have been there a dozen times or more, but their branding is so terrible I can't say what they are called.

Local Moa

The first thing that peaks my interest on the site is the design - it's really nice. The graphics are pleasing to the eye, and it's full of web 2.0 goodness such as shaded text inputs and excessive lime green. Great stuff.

I see their mapping is based on Google maps, which is good - a much better idea for anyone who still thinks the Wises website is cool.

The site is broken down into categories to get you started - NZ hotels, NZ restaurants, entertainment etc.

But what's really important here is the search results. Can it bring up anything useful?

Search results

I'll have a look for my Thai takeaway, so I search for "thai" in "henderson". Sure enough, my local Thai place is called "Thai Pylin Restaurant". Cool. I see the Thai Kitchen in Henderson is missing however, which should definitely be there in the results.

I try a few other local businesses I know exist, such as "childcare in henderson" and "music in henderson" and the results seem to be incomplete. Nobody would expect a complete directory of all businesses in NZ, however the site does need *most* of the businesses for it to be useful to the public. With a well filled out set of business listings, I think this site would be very useful for finding bricks and mortar type businesses near you.

SEO

I'm so used to reviewing sites for SEO mistakes, and I couldn't help myself this time. It's good to see the site owner has a SEO strategy in place. The URLs are nice looking eg http://www.localmoa.co.nz/search/thai/near/henderson

Titles include the words "Thai" and "Henderson" and they have been thoughtfully Camel Cased for readability. Better yet, the search results pages have bookmarkable URLs which search engines can find. Often people make their search results pages unindexable, so it's nice to see this being done. To help this along, the homepage includes links to the 5 most recent searches - presumably to give the spiders something to work with?

Cool - I love to see a strategy in place.

Overall

Overall, I'm impressed with the design, the speed of the site, and the overall functionality. I think the results would need to be more complete before I would use this service myself. I didn't see any way of adding a business into the directory, paid or otherwise - perhaps this would help get some traction.

This article is a paid review of LocalMoa - Local search in New Zealand

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