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

Founded in 1963, Challenger School is an independent, not-for-profit private school that operates 26 campuses in California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Texas. Headquartered out of Sandy, Utah, the school serves children in preschool through grades K–8, providing a bedrock of education in reading, composition, math and history, with a particular focus on phonics.

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 disseminate important campus-specific information more efficiently 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 individualise 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."

Since launching in June 2019, Challenger School has driven over 218K clicks to its listings, which is a YoY growth rate of 27%, in 8 months. This included 25% YoY growth in direction clicks, 31% YoY growth in website clicks, and 36% YoY growth in phone call clicks. Since launch, Challenger School has also experienced over 10.6M impressions on its listings — a YoY growth rate of 79%. Challenger School has optimised for, and sustained increased visibility in the Google SERP. Since launch, 35% of search queries that the school appears in have been unbranded.