Accelerate Marketing Uses Yext to Help Their Customers Be Found In Search

The Challenge

Accelerate Marketing was losing a lot of man-hours manually claiming listings for its customers. Customers were looking to show up in search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other sites. They also needed help with reputation management to generate social proof in the form of satisfied customer reviews. Without a platform to manage all those brand facts, Accelerate was having difficulty helping its customers generate leads. Those businesses were difficult to find online, their phone numbers weren’t accurate and consistent, so people had difficulty getting through, and the leads they did get cost too much.

The company needed one tool that would help it easily manage all the facts about its customers’ brands, suppress duplicate listings, organize and mobilize reputation management, utilize Schema markup to help their content show up in search results — and that didn’t require hours and hours of time to use.

The Solution

By using Yext, Accelerate Marketing is able to help their customers with:

• Positive SERP results, often on the first page of Google, Yahoo! And Bing
• Manage, respond and gain strategic insight from reviews as well as generate first-party reviews on their websites
• Increased number of new reviews customers get each month
• Increase profile views on Google

Accelerate uses Yext to manage the facts about its customers’ businesses on more than 100 search engines, apps and other services in the PowerListings® Network. Accelerate uses the platform to make sure all of the facts about its customers’ brands are consistent across directories. By suppressing duplicate listings, gathering more reviews to increase rankings and credibility, and leveraging Schema to maintain consistency online,  Accelerate gives its customer more “real estate” on Google search results.

Accelerate uses Yext Listings, Reviews, Analytics, and Knowledge Tags. “Yext Listings has been the most impactful — especially when combined with the Intelligent Search Tracker results, and in conjunction with additional systems, to show the increase in rankings we get overtime after we claim the directories,” says Ryan Steinolfson, founder of Accelerate Marketing.

Ryan continues, “Brand Verified Answers are impactful because if you don’t have a listing on a certain directory, then your business won’t even have a chance to be found on that particular directory when people are searching for products or services like yours.”  

Accelerate finds being in control of its clients’ listings on top directories extremely impactful because, once claimed, it updates the Google My Business Page to help optimize the business for applicable search terms.

Yext helps them easily create and measure a winning reviews strategy.

Accelerate needed a system to monitor the top directories for clients, so that they could respond to customer reviews as they came in. On top of that, Accelerate needed a way to generate more first-party reviews on its clients’ websites so that the stars would show up along with the organic search results, giving its customers more social proof and more authority.  

“Responding to reviews is important because it allows the person who left the reviews to feel heard, and sometimes that is all they wanted in the first place. The second reason to respond is so that other customers who see the review can see that you care enough to respond and can also hear your side of the story. Finally, Google will reward a business by adding their star ranking to their organic search results, which can have a very positive impact on click-through rates.”

The Difference:

“We have many property management companies and several other types of businesses that have experienced huge increases in the number of links on the first five pages of the SERPs that is only possible with Yext,” says Ryan. “Our customers get at least a 20% increase in inbound phone calls as a result of people finding them when they search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo for keywords like, ‘Property Management San Antonio,’ etc. It also means that they typically see a 20% or more increase in their listing showing up on search and driving directions.”