“What happens when customers google my business?” Business owners hope that their local marketing and local SEO efforts pay off, but sometimes it’s hard to know. With Yext, a location data and presence management tool, answering that question and reaching your customers can be easier.

What Is Yext?

Yext is one of several firms that has sprung up in recent years to connect customers and businesses dynamically across the web. That’s no simple task, with the need for businesses to have an up-to-date presence on 100 or more “publisher sites” — meaning all those maps, apps, social networks, directories, and search engines managed by Google, Apple, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

You need to be on them all if you’re going to capture the most prospects, because “location, location, location,” right? But how will your business keep all those online presences straight? That’s where Yext’s “location, location, location data management” comes in. Yext connects all the right dots with its Location Cloud, Listings, Pages, Reviews tools to make location data management (LDM) easier.

At Kaleidico, we like Yext a lot. It allows us to iterate quickly and efficiently while also letting us market our clients everywhere they need to be with up-to-date business info. That’s why we’re a Yext Certified Agency Partner and currently run campaigns for many clients using this powerful tool. If you’re looking for a tool to better connect you to your customers, here are some of the benefits Yext can offer your business.

Local Marketing and SEO Benefits

Right off the bat, we like Yext’s Location Cloud platform because it offers centralized control of data. From one screen, you can supply up to 50 fields of info — such as address, phone, holiday hours, product or menu lists, location-specific offers, etc. — that will be consistently populated out to your Facebook, Yelp, Google, Bing, etc., profiles. Your customers will have access to up-to-date data and correct data that doesn’t have a chance to contradict itself.

Yext’s Listings tool has established integrations with, at last count, 138 global publishers in its PowerListings Network. That means your business info can be found everywhere from Foursquare to the Slovakian edition of YellowPages.com, if necessary. We like that brands and marketers can lock down ownership over a listing, schedule convenient info updates for special offers or store hours, and handle synchronization and duplicate issues. It gives businesses a great opportunity to market on all the platforms and services your customers are on, and to have the information presented be correct and consistent.

Yext’s Local Pages tool is perhaps our favorite because it helps push our clients’ business locations to the top of local search results. There is good architecture underlying this tool, allowing pages to load super fast and SEO crawlers to correctly understand and index all your business data. Even better, this tool lets businesses create a customizable location page for each store or office, complete with built-in SEO, add store locators with customizable search filters, build category pages that capture more high-intent traffic and create store directories and multi-language pages as well.

Lastly, Yext’s Review tool helps draw more eyes to our clients’ websites thanks to a savvy review management, generation, and monitoring system. With many web users looking for 4- or 5-star options in the SERPs, it’s important to have the self-generated reviews that Google uses to display those star counts. This system makes it easy to collect authentic reviews on your website or location pages and push those glowing recommendations out to publisher sites where customers will see them.

Closing Thoughts

Yext is a tool we enjoy using ourselves and recommend for many of our clients’ needs. If your own business is looking for a system that gives you a great deal of control, consistency, convenience over your data, and good SEO and local marketing ROI, Yext might just be what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re interested in Yext and would like to work with a Yext Certified Agency Partner on your business’s Yext integration, we’re happy to help. Call us at 313-338-9515 or email hello@kaleidico.com to learn how our full-service digital agency can help improve your SEO and local marketing efforts.