Case Study: How Sorbet’s Local Search Strategy Is a Cut Above the Competition

The Sorbet Group, or Sorbet, was founded in 2005. Over the past 20 years, the brand has grown into a network of more than 200 franchise storefronts across South Africa. Franchise owners can operate Sorbet-branded barber and grooming shops, nailbars, hairbars, and specialty salons offering select services and premium self-care products.

As Leanne Levine, Local Digital Lead for Sauce Advertising on behalf of Sorbet, attests, driving visibility and engagement in the local search environment is key to Sorbet's successful brand and franchise model.

Leanne explains, "We help all of our clients understand their local search environment and show them how to optimize their store locations, not just as a brand, but location by location. We're constantly finding ways to optimize for them, and we use Yext in our strict process for monitoring, reporting, updating the strategy, creating content, and going live with it."

Sorbet operates with five subbrands within the main parent brand. With distinct offerings catering to all genders, hair, and skin types across hair, nail, skincare, massage, waxing, grooming, lash care, and more, Sorbet needs to reach a big national market – but also stay visible in niche local searches.

For years, they operated without a location or listing management system at all — let alone a platform that could let them manage all their locations and data under one dashboard. As they scaled, they knew they needed to make a change. They also needed a tool to centralize and manage high-level brand data while localizing everything from franchise web page content to review management to social media posts.

As Leanne notes, "[With Sorbet, we] needed a solution with new, significant operational value — a tool to understand exactly what an [individual] location needs to work on. So if customers are leaving reviews about bad service… we can sort out the issues down to an operational level."

"At the same time", Leanne continues, "we wanted a tool to help every franchisee understand that they, alone, are the business owner. They're not just at the mercy of what the big brand is doing. We wanted to give them a tool to do everything that the parent brand is doing — on web pages, social, SEO, analytics, reviews – all of these different things impacting their local business in the digital landscape."

With Yext as a cornerstone in their MarTech stack, Sorbet is making the most of the insights and efficiencies that come from using the full suite of Yext tools. They're driving more visibility, engagement, and growth across the Sorbet brand, the five subbrands, and at the local franchise level. Their efforts are now paying off in AI Search as well. Early indications suggest strong visibility and good sentiment across the likes of Chat GPT, Gemini and Perplexity, due to the quality of structured data Sorbet is powering across the digital ecosystem.

As Leanne shares, Yext works for Sorbet as one big ecosystem. They use a range of tools in the Yext platform: Listings, Pages, Reviews, Knowledge Graph, Social, and — with the rise of AI search — they're early adopters of Scout. Every product builds on the Knowledge Graph to create what Leanne calls "gold dust" and "next-level technology."

Leanne explains, "Without [all of the Yext tools], we would have to work a lot harder to perform this well."

As she explains, "We've actually developed what we're calling an HLSM strategy, a hyperlocal store marketing strategy, where we give Sorbet all of these local store websites, essentially. For these stores, Pages helps us optimize a specific store for a specific search and to speak to certain terms because people all over the world search for things differently."

She continues, "Understanding how people are searching and what they're searching for helps us understand what kind of content to be creating for the local store web pages. So, we could be constantly updating the content on those web pages, looking at performance, and being able to pivot and update the content to match whatever's being searched for in that season."

Sorbet recently implemented Yext Reviews, and it's become an immediate game-changer. Since launching, Sorbet has seen a notable improvement in customer sentiment.

Now, with the ability to monitor and manage reviews using generative AI and review response rules, Sorbet has the capacity to take strategic, targeted action to gather more customer feedback and raise ratings.

Leanne shares a compelling example:

Leanne and the Sorbet team have been watching the way AI and LLMs are changing search. Now, with Yext Scout, they've carved out a unique and first-mover advantage in local Google and local AI search.

Because gaining visibility in ChatGPT, Google AIO and AI Mode, and even local AI search platforms like KAIIA, is business critical — and, at the same time, extremely hard to crack — Sorbet has looked to Scout as an instrumental tool for understanding and optimizing local search visibility.

As Leanne explains, "Scout's a big part of how we can understand how locations are showing up in local search — both in AI and in Google. It helps us to understand what they're showing up for, and, more importantly, what they're not showing up for. Then, Scout is showing us how to optimize content on the knowledge graph so Sorbet can speak to those unbranded searches and appear for them."

Leanne shares, "I think Scout is… fantastic. I love it. It's unlike anything we've been able to see in South Africa before."

Leanne continues, "With Scout, we have a lot of analytics tools in place for various things like social media, Google Analytics, LLMs, everything. It's a no-brainer once our clients, like Sorbet, see it in action. It's not pie-in-the-sky marketing or digital strategy that everybody hopes and prays is going to work once you put it in. Scout gives us really, really practical fixes. The outputs are just black and white — this is stuff that needs to be fixed; this is stuff that we can act on really quickly; and this is how we're gonna set you apart from the competitors. And it's all really measurable, which everybody needs in this day and age when it comes to digital marketing."

Leanne is also really impressed by the power and ability to localize content across their top social media platforms, in part because it's been so exciting to see Sorbet franchisees adopt it. Leanne explains that Yext Social has been huge for Sorbet because, in the past, local owners found social media to be overwhelming.

Since partnering with Yext, Sorbet has observed a 22% year-over-year growth in customers clicking to 'Get Directions' on Google and visiting a Sorbet Salon; 138% year-over-year growth in appearing for unbranded 'salon near me' searches on Google; 40% year-over-year growth in appearing for unbranded 'nail salon near me' searches on Google; and 43% year-over-year growth in their Local Salon Web Pages appearing in Google Search Impressions.

Leanne sums up Yext's impact like this:

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