Case Study: Challenger School Delivers Better Information to Parents, Boosts Search Ranking With Yext

Fondée en 1963, Challenger School est une école privée indépendante et à but non lucratif, présente sur 26 sites en Californie, dans l'Idaho, le Nevada, l'Utah et au Texas. Basée à Sandy dans l'Utah, l'école accueille des enfants de la maternelle jusqu'en quatrième, et leur donne les bases en lecture, écriture, mathématiques et histoire, en mettant en avant la phonétique.

Challenger School has been around for more than 50 years, and its network of campuses has grown to 26 — with more locations opening this year. Challenger has always felt confident in its model and curriculum, but in the digital age, the school faced a few challenges on the marketing side. It needed a way to more efficiently disseminate important campus-specific information online — such as snow day closings — and its marketing team was small compared to its number of campuses.

"We know how parents find us, obviously — we have digital advertisements going for specific keywords, and we try to rank organically for important searches," explains Joe Sloan, Digital Marketing Manager at Challenger School. "But we have so many campuses and so much information to manage, and only limited manpower."

Sloan knew that the foundation needed a more efficient, user-friendly way to update its brand information and improve its search ranking as a result. With Yext, any team member can easily update Challenger School's information so that it's correct and consistent across the school's website and third-party channels — providing answers whenever and wherever existing or prospective parents search for information.

"We need to make sure that our profiles and our web presence are buttoned up, especially on third-party sites," Sloan says. "It's nearly impossible to manage all those different profiles, especially for 26 campuses. With Yext, we can easily handle 75 profiles for 26 campus locations. The difference is just astronomical. And having that accurate map information — having accurate names, addresses, and phone numbers across all these profiles — is key to showing up in search."

Since launching with Yext, Challenger School has made over 51K updates to its listings in 8 months. This has helped the school deliver more accurate information to parents when they search for information — driving more high-intent actions in search results, like clicks to the website and clicks-to-call. Additionally, 35% of search queries the school has appeared for since launch have been unbranded, meaning that Challenger School has also improved its visibility for prospective parents who are searching for a query like "private school" rather than "Challenger School" itself.

"Since we're a bit of a larger school system, we have a different formula, where we're trying to get parents to an individual campus page as quickly as possible," Sloan says. "So it's really crucial that — in addition to having all these unique profiles with the correct information, we're driving the traffic where we would like them to land. We always want them to start on a specific campus page, because it helps individualize the school system and directs parents to the specific campus that would be closest to them, or most likely a good fit. Yext makes that process simple."

Depuis qu'elle a commencé à utiliser Yext, la Challenger School a enregistré plus de 218 000 clics sur ses listings, soit une croissance annuelle de 27 % en 8 mois. Cela inclut 25 % de croissance annuelle des clics sur le bouton Itinéraire, 31 % de croissance annuelle des clics vers le site Internet et 36 % de croissance annuelle des clics sur le bouton d'appel. Autre hausse notable, les impressions sur ses listings, au nombre de 10,6 millions pour la période, soit une croissance annuelle de 79 %. La Challenger School a également optimisé et continué d'améliorer sa visibilité dans les résultats de recherche sur Google. Depuis ses débuts avec Yext, 35 % des requêtes de recherche dans lesquelles elle est apparue ne contenaient pas son nom.