Five Guys Drives Footfall and Discoverability with the Yext Search Experience Cloud

Founded in 1986, Five Guys is a family run business that likes to keep things simple. Fresh, fully customisable burgers and fries with above and beyond customer service, in a super clean restaurant. With over 1,800 locations worldwide, the brand has become a firm favourite with burger lovers.

In the UK alone, Five Guys has 150 locations, and managing the facts about the brand online was a complex task. "When I first joined the business, we had a location listings issue. I had store managers telling me that they couldn't find their location on Google or Apple Maps. That was a red flag" said Paul Hamilton, Brand Director at Five Guys JV. "We knew that two-thirds of people who click for directions end up in the store. If you're not providing that call to action, you're not driving footfall."

Five Guys also needed a powerful solution that would help it to manage the thousands of reviews it receives. Before using Yext, the business had no way to assess the overarching sentiment of the reviews or address any pressing issues that might be occurring in one store. It also needed a way to respond to reviews centrally across multiple platforms, in order to ease operational strain and boost consistency across the business.

Initial conversations with Yext centred around the essential need to fix missing and incorrect listings across Five Guys' network. The business chose Yext to underpin its search experience. Yext's differentiator was the numerous other aspects of the platform that could be leveraged to "feed directly down to the bottom line," said Hamilton. "At the time, the additional reviews feature and sentiment analysis were capabilities that only Yext had."

"As search gets more sophisticated, we ourselves need to be more sophisticated in the responses that we give to those searches," said Hamilton. By leveraging Yext, Five Guys can build out its knowledge graph and centrally manage its listings, reviews, and pages from the central dashboard. "We want our information to be available to our customers as quickly as possible on the very first search."

By working with Yext, Five Guys has driven the footfall-generating listings clicks that it was hoping for. Since launch in April 2019, it has seen a 61% year over year growth in clicks (from listings)***, as well as a 73% year over year growth in clicks (from pages)**, bringing total growth up 172% since 2019. "Watching the numbers grow and seeing the year over year improvements gives us such confidence that we're doing the right thing, and it reaffirms our decision to choose Yext," said Hamilton.

Five Guys has also benefited from having complete, consistent, and frequently updated information across a wide variety of listings and local pages. These also have higher search engine placement and potential customers have shown a greater likelihood to engage. This is evidenced by Five Guys' 33% increased ranking on Google, according to Google Search Console (GSC) metrics**, and 2.9x growth to unbranded impressions**. This growth demonstrates how, over the course of a partnership with Yext, Five Guys has nearly tripled its growth in clicks with Yext's Listings and Pages products working together.

Yext has also helped Five Guys surface in nearly 100,000 different queries and phrases on search engines. Moreover, 84,000 (85%) of those unique keywords and phrases that Five Guys shows up for on Google Search are unbranded or do not include the Five Guys brand name in their search. These unbranded queries include highly competitive searches such as "food near me" or more specific queries like "burgers near me" or "food places open now." This demonstrates how competitive and specific inquiries can only be fully leveraged when knowledge management, listings management, and web development expertise are all working together.

A key difference since using Yext is the data that can guide decision-making where it really matters to customers. "We're able to see live feedback from customers come into the platform and, if required, adjust our operations accordingly to ensure we deliver the best service possible" said Paul.

Looking to the future, through its recent adoption of Yext Pages, Five Guys is looking forward to even more positive results and continuing the fantastic relationship that has been forged. "It's a people business, and I genuinely enjoy working and interacting with the Yext team. You don't just buy the company, you buy the people as well."

Since launching in April 2019, Five Guys has experienced:

172% growth in clicks to its listings over the course of Listings and Pages usage*, including:

• 61% growth in increase to clicks from listings***

• 73% growth in clicks following addition of pages**

2.9x More unbranded impressions from Google search since launching Yext Pages**

33% Higher ranking for unbranded queries on Google search since launching Yext Pages**

Footnotes

*Oct 2022 vs. Oct 2018

**Google Search Console Data, May-Oct 2020 vs. May-Oct 2022

***Oct-Dec 2019 vs. Oct-Dec 2018