Case Study: How California Closets Delivers Practical Magic™ that Drives Visibility and Foot Traffic

California Closets pioneered the custom closet industry in 1978, when a college student turned his humble idea for maximizing space in his dorm room closet into a successful small business in Southern California. Today, the California Closets brand delivers custom-designed organizational solutions for the whole home. California Closets also operates 200+ multinational franchises and company-owned showrooms across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

In 2020, California Closets was still performing manual updates to all of its brand-owned and franchise web pages using Wordpress. As Danielle Olivari, Product Manager, Digital Technology, explains, every one of their location pages — including showrooms, team, and designer pages — all needed heavy handling, one page at a time, and it was unsustainable.

"Before Yext, if a local franchise owner wanted to change the address on their showroom page or add a new designer to their team, they came to me to update their pages. And if you can imagine, we have close to 200 locations — all with very large teams. They all had to come to me to update anything and everything online. It wasn't working."

Olivari and team piloted Yext's Page Builder Templates and Yext Classic Pages before finding that the Classic Pages were ideal for their needs.

By turning to Yext, California Closets found a partner that could help them reduce high-touch, low-value manual interventions while, at the same time, empowering local franchisees with an easy-to-use, brand-right tool that keeps their content accurate and complete. As Olivari reports, Yext has been a great solution that helps them work more efficiently and keep their content more localized and up-to-date.

She sums it up this way: "Yext is basically a way for our local franchise teams to have more control over their content."

California Closets runs Yext Classic Pages, fully customizable web pages supported by Yext's Professional Services Team. These pages serve as an extension of the main californiaclosets.com Wordpress site, with a focus on local market content.

The California Closets Yext pages mirror the Brands' web design guidelines to create a one-Brand experience and they are currently redesigning both domains to reflect a more elevated, polished design.

The California Closets Yext pages also leverage multi-lingual capabilities, offering its pages in English, Spanish and French. With Yext Pages and Listings, both supported by the brand's central Knowledge Graph, franchise owners and local managers can share better information, faster, with customers in their community. Meanwhile, her team back at the brand HQ can keep higher-level facts consistent and up-to-date, so there's no confusion or miscommunication at the local retail level.

Her team might use Listings to sync holiday hours and showroom closures. Local teams can also update hours for weather events or if a keyholder needs a late start.

Yext Pages lets local showrooms display specific images and seasonal promotions. They can also highlight backstock and introduce new designers or recent projects. This makes the content highly relevant to their customers.

As Olivari attests, "We had to find a platform that could mimic the look and feel of our main WordPress site while allowing multiple logins that give local teams control of their content, while ensuring the foundational design of our pages remains consistent and on-brand."

She continues, "Yext also gave us some optimizations with SEO and Google My Business, which has been very helpful for us."

California Closets is using Yext Listings, Pages, and Knowledge Graph to boost their brand visibility while promoting 1,655 designers at 182 locations in 139 US markets and another 43 international locations. Yext helps California Closets manage data across 8,580+ listings and 80 publishers, such as OpenAI, Uber Freight, and American Express.

Thanks to Yext, every brand and franchise location appears on 85% of relevant publishers. All listings stay synced, making sure that updates are accurate, brand-right, and published quickly at scale.

In the past 12 months, California Closets has been able to:

• Make 62.8K profile updates, up +141% Year over Year (YoY)

• Suppress 340 duplicate listings or fake data, finding +113% more dupes or bad data YoY

• Received 1.07M page views, up +4% YoY

• Earned 6.7M Google Search impressions, up 45% YoY

• Increased Google search impressions on Maps to 405K, up 12% YoY, resulting in a +2% increase in engagements for driving directions Increased unbranded search Impressions for local web pages by 24% YoY**

The brand, digital, and local marketing teams have seen incredible lifts with their migration to the Yext platform. From workflow efficiencies that make time for high-value SEO analysis and boosts in visibility to localized content management, California Closets is front-and-center in both branded and unbranded search results.

As Olivari reports, they're now operating with accurate, up-to-date, and locally relevant content at every one of their 182 locations. As a result, they're attracting more clicks, engagement with driving directions, and opportunities with foot traffic.

"With Yext, we actually have time to analyze our local pages, create and share reports with local teams, and give them actionable suggestions for how to boost SEO. Maybe they haven't updated their page in a while, and they need to put some keywords in there. Maybe they've updated their images, but didn't know to put in keyword-friendly alt text and titles."

This service and efficiency boost job satisfaction and brand reputation with franchise owners. It also improves California Closet's customer experience.

Olivari shares, "We get good feedback all the time, like how easy it is to serve their customers. It's so easy to manage the information that they need to get to customers. Plus, with the Listings and Pages, everything they need — in terms of hours, if a showroom is closed, the directions, what the location or products look like — all of that is right there for them. And it looks like our website! Customers think they're on the California Closet's main domain. It's exactly what we wanted."

To learn more about Yext's offerings, book a demo today.