For Philly Search Engine Marketing Clients It’s Yext First

“With Yext, it only took a few hours  for our first-party reviews to be displayed in the search engine results. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

• Gary Steel, Founder, Philly Search Engine Marketing

What problems do your customers come to you to solve? How does Yext fit into this picture?

Many clients are simply unsure of how to translate their successful offline businesses into an online strategy. That’s where Philly Search Engine Marketing comes in. We take what has worked for the business over the years and translate it into keywords that the search engines understand — or word of mouth that social media can spread.

Using analytics to inform our decisions, we can see, nearly instantly, what is working and what is not working. As we read the analytics a story emerges to help us make smarter decisions about creative or media selection choices. Yext fits neatly into that picture from the very first step in the process. Virtually every business that has an online presence will also have an online listing.  Everyone needs to be listed on the major publishers.

What do advances in intelligent search technology mean for you and your customers?

The only thing we can be certain of is that there will be more rapid, disruptive changes ahead in online marketing. I view my job as an educator for my clients. My responsibility is to stay on top of the latest technology, trends, and products — and be able to instruct my clients on the relevant products for to meet their goals.

I also believe that today’s advertising professional should have creative juice informed by data. One of my favorite sayings is “Let the data inform your decision.” There’s an answer in the numbers.

Intelligent search, as we call it today, is when the search engines marry all sorts of signals to generate a search result — location, proximity, accuracy, context, reviews, context in terms of multiple queries, brand, time, and more all contribute to predicting the most relevant answers. I believe that the most authoritative way to gather data about a business is through the business owner. That’s what makes Yext so powerful.

Through the Analytics in your dashboard, do you have any examples of hidden insights that you have uncovered?

The Share of Intelligent Search metric in the Yext Analytics Intelligent Search Tracker provides detailed data on the likelihood that a customer will click on our listing as compared to our competition. For instance, an appearance in the first position in the 3-pack yields a 35.2% likelihood of a click. When you consider there are four PPC results, three map results and 10 organic links on a SERP, a 37% chance of getting the click on the 3-pack listing is a terrific percentage. This demonstrates the importance of a holistic search engine marketing effort.

What business challenge led you to partner with Yext?

I plugged one of my clients into Yext’s free scan tool. After seeing the tool render the report, light bulbs went off in my head. I had just spent days manually correcting the online listings for one of my clients, and Yext could do it instantly. The clients don’t have days to wait, and I needed a faster workflow to get the job done. From that moment, I was sold.

What features have been most impactful to your customers?

With Yext, the client’s business data is accurately pushed out in near real time to all of the most authoritative publishers on the web. Within a day or so, we begin to suppress the duplicate listings, and in a few days after that, I can schedule the first of our regular reports from the Yext Analytics module. That’s a space where Yext stands out from the pack.

Analytics is a superb way to demonstrate real value to the client. One of my favorite reports is the “Google Customer Actions” report which details the Phone Calls, Website Visits and Directions that potential customers requested directly from the search engine results page.

Who at your company uses the Yext platform?

My philosophy is to empower the clients with the control, and be fully transparent as well as instructive on the importance of Yext’s offering. As a partner, I have the ability to give each client access to their own dashboard of locations without disrupting one another. Clients love the ability to have full control of their data and reports at their pleasure. It gives them a greater amount of control over their online presence.

What sort of results have you seen from Yext, and how do we help you show that return on investment to your customers?

Measuring results from Yext is super easy. My clients get regular reports on Google Customer Actions like website clicks, directions, and phone calls from the search engine results page, search terms reports that reveal branded vs. non branded search and receive an email every time a customer takes the time to review their business online.

The reports are fully automated, and that saves me the time to focus on executing their business strategies. At the end of the day it is about foot traffic and cash register rings. Just the other day a client told me they fully attribute their improved online listing visibility to acquiring their most recent and largest account.

How much of a time or money savings do you experience using Yext?

Everything about Yext is intuitive and easy to use.

From the perspective of an operator like me, I save countless hours. There’s no way I could do what Yext does manually. There are simply too many listing services and publishers —and too much data that needs to be input. I can (or the client can) input the data once, press save, and the data is pushed to the most authoritative publishers around the world.

Is there a story you have as an example of something you wouldn’t have been able to do without Yext’s technology?  

Within only three or four hours (something that could never be accomplished manually) we were able to sign up with Yext, generate reviews, install the first-party review widget on the client’s website, resubmit the site to Google, and return a 5-star review on the search engine results page. The speed to getting all that accomplished was so fast we would not have believed it happened unless we saw the results with our own eyes. It could not have been done without Yext.

What do your customers think of Yext?

All my customers know about Yext. They know that I am passionate about the company and their products, and they know it’s very important for their business. To tell you the truth, for most people in business “the map and the 3 pack” is the farthest thing from their mind. Maybe it’s because they take it for granted. Clients that stop and think about how their customers find their business online are as convinced about Yext’s offering as I am.

How important are reviews to your customers, and how has Yext helped with showcasing reviews everywhere prospects are searching — any anecdotes?

In the local SEO space, reviews are extremely important. There are three essential components to getting in the “map and 3-pack.”  Proximity to the search, accuracy of your business data across the world’s most authoritative publishers, and reviews. Reviews should be recent and highly rated.

Yext provides a slick review monitoring and review generation tool that enables businesses to keep track of, answer, generate, and spread out reviews all over the web. There’s nothing like it on the market.