Romeo’s Pizza Uses Yext to Increase Search Views, Online Orders and Star Ratings

Romeo's Pizza is an award-winning traditional delivery/carry-out brand with 35 domestic locations, two international locations, and distinctively fresh pizza sauce.

"Our brand is about creating memorable experiences — plain and simple," says David McCafferty, Romeo's CMO. "83% of people eat pizza at least once a month, and 43% of them eat it at least once a week. Our goal is to be at the top of your list when you're ready to order. We know that there are a lot of larger players in the space, but we live and breathe and hang our hat on product integrity. We want to be the brand you invite to dinner."

Romeo's kicked off a major customer-facing brand identity initiative, overhauling its online presence and search experience to create a cohesive customer experience across digital touchpoints like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and many more. As part of this process, McCafferty recognized that the online reviews customers were leaving offered deep insights into consumer perceptions of the brand — but Romeo's needed a strategy for efficiently collecting and analyzing those reviews.

Along with revamping the brand, increasing online orders was also a priority. The Romeo's team sought a scalable solution to help improve store visibility in local searches, inspire customers to click, and deliver a more seamless experience along the way.

"Every place a customer could interact with our brand has been touched over the last two years," says McCafferty. "We know how important digital is to our business. Driving more online orders is a top priority for us, but we wanted to approach it the right way. So we started from a place of wanting to understand what our customers were saying about us online so that we could harness that feedback."

Romeo's Pizza first launched with Yext to gain an understanding of what customers were saying online. "We started with about an average 3.4 rating on Google," McCafferty says. "We started to monitor and respond to reviews with Yext, and within 60 days, we were up to 3.9. We realized the power of Reviews right away."

Romeo's quickly leveraged Yext's full capabilities. By managing brand information across digital properties with Yext, Romeo's drives internal efficiencies and provides the seamless customer experience that returns even more outstanding reviews.

"We started really focusing on our Google business listings last year, and we saw that we were having a much bigger impact through Yext than through standard SEO protocol on our website alone," McCafferty says. "We know that search has become much more local, and we've been able to rank in those searches with Yext."

Yext lets Romeo's manage their brand experience from both third-party listings and store pages. It also gives a manager on Romeo's team the ability to create and manage uniform, fast-loading landing pages that are populated with accurate and consistent brand information, and optimized to rank at the top of high-intent search results.

Prior to launching with Yext, Romeo's was experiencing 13% year over year growth in Google Search Views. In the first year after launch, year-over-year growth increased to 90% — an incremental lift of 77%.

At launch, Yext pulled in 1.4k historical reviews from Romeo's listings, providing visibility into brand reputation across publishers over time. In the first year after launch, Yext pulled in an additional 1.2k reviews to allow ongoing monitoring of brand reputation.

In the first three months after launching with Yext, Romeo's saw growth in visibility and engagement for those local pages via search. Since launch, page impressions have grown an average of 137% per month, and pages clicks have increased by 162%.

Romeo's also leveraged Yext to streamline their process of assigning and responding to reviews directly in the platform. As a result, the response rate increased from 1% to 69% in the year following launch.

What began as a straightforward reviews strategy for Romeo's has evolved to include an enhanced focus that drives even greater discoverability and customer actions. With consistent, properly marked-up pages that are easy to manage and scale, Romeo's is surfacing in Google search results more often when customers search for pizza delivery and carry-out — generating more local pages impressions and clicks, and boosting online orders. Romeo's also now sees actionable insights into location-specific operational challenges, leading to more satisfied customers and improved average star rating online.

"After three months with Pages alone — without doing anything else as it relates to ads or keywords — we saw a 5% increase in online orders," says McCafferty. "That's incredible, and it shows us that we're clearly on the right track to achieve 50% online ordering with Yext."
McCafferty's team also compared data for clicks on Romeo's Google My Business listings to online order data from mid-April 2018 through December 2018. "We discovered that there was a 43% action-to-order correlation. So, we believe that by managing Google My Business, our pages, and everything else in the Yext platform, it has dramatically increased our online ordering and had a positive impact on our business."

Since launching with Yext, Romeo's has driven over 18,000 clicks from nearly 1,000 queries.