Publishers 101: Who They Are & What You Need to Know

When you think about how customers search for information about your company, you probably picture them visiting your website. But in reality, those few extra clicks from the search engine results page to your homepage may be too much to ask of some customers.

Our research* finds that, on average, your listings with third-party publishers are likely to receive 2.7x more views than your website, meaning two things:

• Customers are interacting with your listings more than your website.

• Your company needs to be in complete control of that touchpoint.

To truly capitalize on this customer interaction, your business needs an optimized strategy for managing your listings — and part of that process is getting to know the publishers in play.

Publishers share information about your business and promote your products and services via online business listings. These listings can be found across the internet, from publishers like Facebook, Google, Waze, Yelp, and more.

Every listing with each publisher is an opportunity to inform consumers and showcase what you offer. This can include basic information about your business — like your phone number, location(s), products/services, and hours of operation — as well as deeper information that can be specific to your industry. Restaurants, for example, can feature menu items or if they accept reservations while hospitality brands can indicate whether or not breakfast is included, or if wifi is available.

By filling out your listings data as much as possible (as long as it's relevant to your business), you're able to optimize your listings to help ensure a positive customer experience and capture more traffic from search.

With 86% of search traffic coming from Google, it's no secret that managing your Google listings should be a top priority. However, neglecting listings on other publishers can negatively impact your business for two main reasons:

1. Missing out on a substantial amount of business. If 86% of search traffic comes from Google, that means 14% of consumers search for your business using a variety of other platforms – not just Google. Think of all the publishers that are specific to certain geographies and business types:

• Popular publishers for Restaurants: UberEats, Doordash, OpenTable

• Popular publishers for Health Systems: Vitals, WebMD, Wellness.com, Caredash

• Popular publishers for Hospitality: TripAdvisor

• Popular publishers for Financial Services: WiserAdvisor, Banks.com, RetirementPlanning.net

By not actively managing your listings everywhere potential customers could be searching, you're likely leaving a substantial amount of potential revenue on the table.

2. Search. Google cross references how your information is listed on other third-party sites. Any missing information or inconsistencies across your listings, such as an old phone number, sends poor trust signals to Google. As a result, Google could be less likely to rank your business in search because they're less confident in the accuracy of your company's listed information.

Ultimately, the most successful businesses – at least those that perform the best in search – optimize their listings across the most number of third-party sites.

Managing every single listing may sound like a lot of work — and it can be. To make manual updates for every listing and each location could be a full time job on its own.

However, there are other (less labor intensive) approaches to listings management. Yext supports approximately 250 third-party publishers — including Google, Facebook, and Bing — primarily via direct API integrations*. An integral resource for your listings management strategy, Yext allows you to update your listings in real time from a centralized dashboard.

Whether you are only just beginning your listings management journey or you're already comfortable working with publishers, Yext will help your organization answer every question about your business.

*Yext proprietary data

**Yext does not have an API integration with all publishers in its Publisher Network.