What's the deal with Yext?
-
Ok, the "SEO" in me says don't sign my clients up for this. But their ads are EVERYWHERE. All the time. Is this bad/good? thoughts? Have you ever used Yext? I can't find a review online that I don't think is biased. Should I trust my gut on this one and pass?
-
Hi Courtney,
I support the sound conclusion you've reached. As the marketer on the project, hands-on nearly always beats automation. Whitespark's service is terrific and if you're using that and hand building citations for your clients, they have an edge over other companies who have taken the automated route, simply because someone (read: you) has maximum control over their citation profile. Great responses on this thread.
-
All good answers. It is relieving to know that my doubt in Yext could be substantiated by other valued members here. Sounds like building them myself (I use Whitesparks) is the way to go. But - it is time consuming. If I need a quick fix, I could do Yext, but I will not count on it for long term or consistency. Using it to "brainstorm" is a great idea! Thanks for the info about their advertising as well Patrick. That sure makes sense!
-
Hi Courtney,
Kudos to you in not trusting everything you read online
Reviews can always be skewed, so asking around has been what I do a lot of as well. Thanks for posing the question.
Let me answer your comment about seeing their Yext ads everywhere... You see them everywhere because they are heavy remarketers. So, when you visit their website and browsed around, they dumped a cookie on your browser, essentially tracking you and wherever their remarketing campaign could place an ad to bring you back to their site with an ad graphic, they will make sure you see it. Big money spent on that type of online marketing! If you delete your cookies, then Bye Bye to their ads. Or you could disable cookies on your browser altogether if you wanted.
We've used Yext before and referred clients to them or helped clients go through their service. There were issues with some clients and others went flawlessly. It is a time saver for sure, but know it's automated and their support lacks big time. There are resources out there to find the best, most relevant directories and sites which Yext and other services like them build profiles for links, so create that link in XLS and work on them manually, unless you have a ton of clients who need listings created. Keep track of all logins in the XLS file for each client so if they ever move, you can provide to them or have easy access to info if things need updated. Yext won't make updates unless you are a paying customer as well and things tended to take a long time for those updates to occur. Same for UBL out of Charlotte... I knew some people who worked for them when I started my business.
Hope this was helpful and a solid answer to help you make a decision! - Patrick
-
I agree with Oleg. In theroy it's a great tool, but we've seen issues with it as well. It sometimes doesn't always work and it somtimes says things are "broken" when in fact the listings are correct.
What we suggest is that you use it as a "brain storming" tool for where you should build links to your local listings.
-
Manual > Yext BUT Yext take a lot less management/time/effort and will be effective in ranking small businesses.
So if you have the time and resources to hire and manage an employee/outsourcer to manually submit, claim, verify and update your listings - do that.
Yext pretty much does that but all automated through a backend. You enter your business info and Yext submits/updates the listings on all the sites (I don't know whether they have outsourcers doing it on their end or its all coded). I've found that changes take longer to update with Yext and isn't as flexible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
HELP!! We are losing search visibility fast and I don't know why?
We have recently moved from http to https - could this be a problem? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk As far as I'm aware we are doing everything by SEO best practice and have no manual penalties, all content is unique and we are not doing any link farming etc...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | The-Present-Finder0 -
Pages mirrored on unknown websites (not just content, all the HTML)... blackhat I've never seen before.
Someone more expert than me could help... I am not a pro, just doing research on a website... Google Search Console shows many backlinks in pages under unknown domains... this pages are mirroring the pages of the linked website... clicking on a link on the mirror page leads to a spam page with link spam... The homepage of these unknown domain appear just fine... looks like that the domain is partially hijacked... WTF?! Have you ever seen something likes this? Can it be an outcome of a previous blackhat activity?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2mlab0 -
Google's Related Searches - Optimizing Possible?
Does anyone know how Google determines what suggestions show up at the bottom of SERPs? I've been working with a client to boost his local ranking, but every time we do a branded search for his business his competitors keep popping up in the "Searches related to ______" section.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mtwelves0 -
Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!
Hi everyone, Thank you for your time. During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all. I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated. Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again. The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S. Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc... Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%. If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated. I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings. Thanks for your help. Lyam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlphaDigital20 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
Local Map Pack: What's the best way to handle twin cities?
Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located. However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid. Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address! We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
So what's up with UpDowner.com?
I've noticed these guys in link profiles for several sites I manage. They'll usually show up around 1,000-10,000 times in the backlink profile. From what I can tell they index websites, build up keyword relationships, and then when you search for something on their site (e.g. poker) they'll present a list of related sites with stats about them. The stats seem to be yanked straight from Alexa. Where the backlink comes from is that every time 'your' site shows up for a search result they'll put a little iframe that contains your site. This means if your site's name/keywords are pretty broad, you could be showing up thousands and tens of thousands of times as being linked from these guys on their pages that Google indexes. And Google indexes, boy do they ever. At the height, they had over 53 million pages indexed. That has apparently shrunk now to around 25 million. I believe their strategy is to generate a crap-load of automated content in the hopes they can cash in on obscure long tails. So my questions for you guys are: Are you seeing them in your backlinks too? Should I block their spider/referrers? What is their deal man?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icecarats0