What Value Can Yext Pages Add to Your Listings?

The search landscape is evolving, and customer behavior is shifting with a desire for clear and concise answers. People are performing more unbranded searches (for terms like "cheeseburger" or "cardiologist"), rather than searching for specific brands or institutions. And these searches often come with local and immediate intent (like "best cheeseburger near me").

When search engines serve up local search results for these products and services, their algorithms return listings for the brands they are confident can fulfill that customer's need. Naturally, as a marketer, you want your brand to be among them — so that you can engage customers and drive business.

But how do search engines know if the restaurant down the street has cheeseburgers? Or if the closest hospital in town even has a cardiology department? It all depends on the (correct and consistent) information you publish across the web.

By combining your listings management strategy with SEO-optimized pages, you can better communicate your brands' offerings to search engines and other AI-led technologies — and drive more clicks and conversions as a result. Here's how.

To succeed in search, brands need to start with a robust digital presence, with listings coverage across an extended network of publishers. (If you're interested in looking at the data that proves why, click here.)

To get a bit more granular: we've known for a long time that consistency of key information (especially NAP: name, address, phone number) across your listings is very important for SEO. (Again, because search engines like Google have a higher confidence that this information is correct, they are more likely to rank you higher in results.) But search today is about so much more than "only" NAP data. Search engines and AI-led technologies look across the web at all of the other places your business content is being mentioned.

This includes other provider's listings — as well as your own website to validate the information that they have. This is where having a local pages strategy comes into play — and helps you boost your SEO performance even further.

Local pages are dedicated landing pages with information that pertains to a particular place or region. Some examples could include: the landing page for your brand's flagship store location, or a booking page for Dr. Raymond Smith at his downtown office, or a carpet cleaning service page with information about rates in a certain city.

Creating local pages allows a business to showcase location-specific content, such as phone numbers, addresses, hours of operation, events, promotions, or calls-to-actions (like "make an appointment," or "inquire about pricing in my region").

Hosting pages with this localized information clearly laid out 1) centralizes important business facts for the customer and 2) makes it easier for search engines to crawl your page and understand your offering.

This way, when a prospective customer types, "tomato soup near me," or "nail salon open late," into a search engine, your page can be surfaced in third-party search results if it offers relevant content in that customer's local market.

With Yext Pages, you can easily power unique local pages that correspond to every one of your listings. This means that every time you open a new restaurant, hire a new financial advisor, add another medical provider, or open a new store location, you can seamlessly spin up a highly-performant page — leveraging all of the content that you already have stored in the listing.

But just how beneficial is this strategy to your SEO? What level of lift can you expect to see in your listings' performance?

We conducted a study* of Yext customers who originally started out using only Listings but later added Pages. After adding Pages, these customers on average saw a:

• 31% growth in listings clicks

• 46% growth in impressions

• 39% growth in unbranded queries

As an example: one Yext customer using Listings was ranking for 3k unique search terms each month. After adding Pages, they immediately saw a more than 2x increase in the number of unique search terms each month.

This is significant because it shows the expanded potential reach you have when customers are making unbranded searches for anything they need, whether that's a new product, service, restaurant, or advisor (and the list goes on).

These unbranded searches (again "cardiologist" or "baby clothes") represent an incredible opportunity to attract new customers in your local market. If you want to improve the discoverability of your business and drive more traffic to your site, you will want your pages to show up more often across a wider range of search terms — because it increases the chances that customers see your content, click through to your website, and ultimately book an appointment, make a purchase, visit your store, or engage further with your brand.

Adding Yext Pages can help you do just that. By putting relevant, rich, SEO-optimized content on your local pages, you can easily signal your offerings to search engines, so that your page shows up when a user types in a particular keyword or expresses a particular intent. And with Yext Analytics, you can understand the search terms that are and are not driving customers to your pages, so that you can continuously optimize your content over time to reach your intended audience.

The data makes it clear: having local pages amplifies the performance of your listings and helps your brand become more discoverable in third-party search. With this better discoverability, you also experience higher engagement on your listings — ultimately driving more conversions when customers arrive at your local landing page.

Third-party location listings can only contain so much information. Local pages give you more room – allowing you to list more rich content that will help users make informed decisions. (For example, you can create local landing pages for upcoming events that list not only the location and the time, but also the full schedule, different ticket types, special discounts, and more.)

By creating local landing pages with structured data and linking third-party listings to those pages, search engines can associate all of that content on the page with the corresponding listing. Essentially, a local landing page is an extension of the local listing — one that's not limited in the attributes it can store.

Why use Yext for your local pages? Well:

• We centralize content management with our CMS — so that you always have consistent information about your brand across the web (including Pages, Listings, and Search). Most solutions have completely different systems for managing content that goes on your pages versus content sent to your listings — which means you're more likely to have mistakes or inconsistent information across the web.

• We make it easy to manage many local pages at scale — while maintaining top page load speeds. With Yext, you can spin up as many pages as you need — including combinatorial pages (such as for a doctor who treats X condition and practices Y at Z location).

• We are local SEO experts: Yext Pages come pre-built with all the technical requirements for SEO out-of-the-box. We have in-house technical resources, and we don't outsource this work to a separate agency.

Dedicated local landing pages help you provide a better experience to your customers. Ready to save time and reduce friction with Pages? Click here.

*Yext internal study, January 2023, examining data for ~300k locations for businesses with at least 4 months of Pages data and a year's worth of prior Listings data.