Case Study: InstaVolt Boosts Brand Visibility With Yext

InstaVolt is the largest fully public owner-operator of ultra-rapid DC (Direct Current) electric charging stations in the UK. With more than 800 active locations across Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland and the United Kingdom and over 15 new sites added each month, InstaVolt partners with popular retail and hospitality services, including McDonald's, Starbucks, Costa Coffee, and Bannatyne Health Club, so drivers can recharge their own batteries while easily charging their EV.

As more drivers switch to electric vehicles, the demand for fast, reliable charging is growing. For InstaVolt, this has meant a business commitment to installing 11,000 chargers across the UK and ROI by 2030, which they are on track to achieve

But building the charging stations is just one half of the equation: drivers still need to be able to find them exactly when and where they were needed. To make this possible, InstaVolt needed to focus more on improving its brand visibility.

Prior to Yext, InstaVolt would manage each of their locations manually. As the business expanded rapidly, this process became unsustainable, and led to inconsistent information across multiple platforms. Victoria Hutton, Head of Digital Marketing at InstaVolt, joined the team just as they were embarking on this new initiative. She saw firsthand how much opportunity there was to unify their location data, scale positive reviews, and increase search performance. "We needed a scalable way to ensure our data was accurate, our chargers were easy to find, and our brand looked trustworthy across every platform," Hutton said.

InstaVolt partnered with Yext in 2024 to streamline their data and improve how their locations appear online. The first phase of this partnership focused on migrating hundreds of existing locations onto the Yext Platform, working very closely with Yext's customer support and implementation teams to make sure dynamic and static data points were correct.

With over 15 new charging locations being added to the Yext Platform monthly, InstaVolt needed an easy and repeatable process to create new entities in Yext before the locations were even activated with electricity in order to create a more thoughtful SEO-optimized description and ensure new charging locations could be discovered in search the moment they went live. As a result, the InstaVolt team created a template that is automatically applied to each new location with fields that need to be updated 100% of the time, such as category, address, hours, website, and photos of the charging location. The team will also add additional property IDs based on where the charging location is located, such as a McDonald's, or nearby landmarks, such as "National Trust in Maidenhead". This helped InstaVolt to improve their visibility in unbranded search (i.e., searches for "electric charger near me" rather than "InstaVolt"), and after they made these changes, unbranded Google Search Term impressions increased 69%.

Since partnering with Yext, positive customer sentiment and average star rating increased for InstaVolt. By using Yext Reviews to manage reviews more efficiently and deliver a positive customer experience across all of their locations, they have been able to respond to 100% of reviews across 750+ locations, while also seeing a 8% year-over-year increase in their average star rating. Hutton has also observed an increase in user-generated content across InstaVolt Social Media channels, especially after the launch of their superhub in Winchester, the largest EV hub in the UK with a fully operational solar panel-powered battery on site to power the chargers.

"We've seen customers leaving reviews, sharing photos, and tagging us on social media. It's clear they're proud to visit our chargers and trust the InstaVolt brand. It's natural for people to leave negative feedback, but with Yext Reviews we can respond quickly and personally. Instead of generic replies, we're able to provide thoughtful, detailed responses that show drivers we value their experience."

In addition to managing their reputation at scale, InstaVolt now has more visibility into how their brand visibility connects with real-world charger usage. The team closely monitor impressions and actions across listings, using this data to understand how easily customers are finding locations online. While charger utilization is influenced by many factors, such as local roadwork or seasonal travel patterns, the team consistently saw a spike in impressions and actions immediately after launching and optimizing each location with Yext. Further, they found that optimized chargers consistently received more impressions and engagement versus non-optimized locations.

"Yext gives us the confidence that when a driver searches, our chargers are easy to find. Even when outside factors affect utilization, we know our brand visibility is working as hard as possible to connect people with our network," says Hutton.

In the first year of the partnership, InstaVolt's local brand visibility has grown significantly. With Yext powering their 27,000+ listings across 62 publishers such as Waze, MyLondon, Daily Record, and other search engines, maps, apps, and voice assistants, the brand has recorded more than 44.6 million Google Search impressions—a year-over-year increase of 85%. Engagement climbed alongside impressions, with over 610,000 total actions taken across listings, including 547,000 clicks for driving directions. In total, over 80,000 listing updates have been made in the past 12 months alone, representing a 39% increase in update volume compared to the previous year.

For InstaVolt, the data highlights the impact, but the real success lies in the trust InstaVolt has earned with drivers and the consistency they can now deliver as the network grows. With Yext at the core of their digital strategy, InstaVolt is doing more than expanding its charging network, they're making every new location easier to find and more reliable for the people who need it.

To learn more about Yext's offerings, book a demo today. To learn more about or to find an InstaVolt charger near you, visit their website today.