The YEXT Service
Is Yext, alone, enough to fix your online business listings once and for all? Using Yext to correct your company’s name/address/phone (NAP) discrepancies on internet yellow page type websites has many advantages. In a matter of hours your proper business info can be synced on at least 40-50 venues with another 10-15 venues corrected within a few days or a week thereafter. However, there are a few reasons why you should trust your business listing submission, correction and optimization work to professionals instead of taking a DIY approach and using Yext alone.
Many More Fish In The Sea
Yext is a great tool. Before we started using it, we spent hours and hours sifting through online business listings claiming and updating them one by one. However, just as your parents may have told you that there are ‘plenty of fish in the sea’, after breaking up with a girlfriend or boyfriend, I am here to tell you that there are a crazy number of internet yellow page (IYP) venues our there for you, on which to list your company’s NAP, that is! Yext currently covers ‘about’ 50 venues. Yes, that number has grown nicely over the past couple of years, but unfortunately, Yext does not control the data on every IYP website. Bad listing data most likely exists in venues outside of their partner network. For example, Yext won’t update your business listing on YellowPages.com, the BBB website, Manta, Judy’s Book, Angie’s List, Insider Pages or Hot Frog, to name just a few important listing venues. They also do not handle duplicate listing suppression on Bing, DexKnows, YellowBot and several of their ‘mobile’ partners such as Cricket, MetroPCS, Navmii, Telenav, TomTom, TracFone and Verizon. As for WhitePages Inc network, Yext does not allow manual duplicate listing requests, most likely because many listings on that network need to be handled at the major aggregator level.
Patching Downstream vs Fixing the Source
Though Yext’s method to control listing data is to lock it at the publisher level (aka their partners), this doesn’t fix the ‘sources’ of listing errors. They are a data overlay which tells their partner venues to use particular data for as long as the service is paid. Don’t get me wrong, I highly suggest using Yext’s service due to the ease of updating many listings very quickly, but Yext should be used as a part of a more complete listing correction or optimization service package. Incorrect listing data across the internet can originate from many sources, such as outdated government databases, printed city business directories, a company’s website, or even a search engine crawling and scraping the data from another webpage.
Ensure your NAP is correct downstream!
Major business data aggregators exist that draw all sorts of these various data sources together to create a database of company information. They may sell the database to marketers or they may sell it to internet yellow page type internet venues, so they can have a bigger collection of companies to display on their websites. Your business listing data must be updated in these major aggregators to help ensure that listing info is properly propagated downstream. If the source is not corrected, then incorrect data is likely to reappear across the internet, leading to frustration and more time spent on correcting the data situation.
Attention to Details
A professional internet marketing team can ensure that your NAP listings are corrected correctly. It is important to pay attention to details when it comes to business listing clean up work. For example, it is very important to local search engine rankings to have your company listed in the proper categories. A ‘Catholic Church’ shouldn’t be listed as a ‘Buddhist Temple’ and it is important for a ‘Plumber’ to be listed as such rather than just a ‘Contractor’. If care is not taken to review each listing, you may end up with lower rankings and decreased visibility instead! Let us help you fix your online business listings! Fill out our NAP Info Form or our contact us form and we will get back to you with a scope of work and price quote. We can also help you align your website to current SEO industry standards to maximize your marketing potential.