HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

Received an email from MyCorporation.com touting a new partnership with Yext. They provide a slick dashboard that helps small businesses manage their local online presence. Normal price is $499/yr and they are offering a year end special at 10% discount.

http://www.yext.com/pl/mycorporation-listing/index.html

Any input about this company or knowledge of customer experiences is appreciated.

VERY! We took a hard look at them a few years ago. I know some people around here have tried to get leads via them too...

You should think of Yext as the PPC of Local SEO. It is a pay to play advertising product where they have arranged special deals with many of the local directories. Guess who is missing? That is right.. Google. So, you get an advertising product on most of the tier 2 directories but you don't get Google+ Local.

It isn't a bad deal but you'll also need services to make sure you capture the market share that Google has in local search. Oh and when you stop paying, your listing goes away... just like an ad.

So here's my take on Yext... Not a huge fan of it. After discussing using this with other marketers I learned of one major problem with Yext, aside from not getting info to Google+Local (like chad said). They have partnerships with all those tier 2 directories, but they don't claim existing profiles. They create a duplicate page with the info that you submit to them. If you're a new business, then it works fine. If you've been around for a while it could cause problems.

Situation 1: You have a listing already on a site with the correct information (NAP)... lets say on Citysearch (so I can speak in specifics). Yext will claim that page and update you with info about the page.

Situation 2: You already have a listing on Citysearch, but the phone number (or address) is wrong. Yext won't claim and update that page, they'll create a new one. So they didn't actually clean up incorrect citations, they just created a new page. Now you have multiple citations floating around to directories, which will create duplicate pages appear in other places like Google. Dupes are rough to deal with because they split ranking power between the two pages and could cause a bunch of other issues.

Situation 3: You didn't have a page created on Citysearch yet, and Yext creates one for you. Cool.

Situation 1 and 3 are the optimal outcomes, but a majority of the time you'll have clients fall into situation 2. If the client is in that 2nd situation where duplicates get created because of incorrect info then it helps to get correct info out there, but it doesn't fix the crummy business listing.

I've talked with people who've had problems with yext because of the messy citation thing. Personally you'd be better off submitting to infogroup (free), localeze(paid), or axciom(paid). Those are the big 3 data providers, and the business info will eventually reach all the sites (plus way more) within the year. A premium subscription to Localeze is $297/year and Axciom is $50/listing/year (I believe...). You would save $102 per business, and it would only take a little longer to reach the directories. Plus Localeze submits to 150 directories... Yext submits to 43 directories (they advertise 35+)... :-/

http://getlisted.org/resources/listing_time_to_live.pdf

Sorry for the long post.... I always seem to have a lot to say when it comes to Local SEO, lol

Thanks to Adam, Chad and Eric for the terrific insight on Yext. It is most helpful.

Forgive this question as a new HubShout reseller. Does our offering include claiming/fixing listings in most directories including Google+ Local

Claiming Local Listing: Definitely. Very standard thing we do over and over every day.

Top 3 Local Search Engine Placement Factors Video

Video on our Local SEO packages


Fixing: Usually... We've fixed many of these. But it, of course, depends on what's wrong...

Yes, Google+Local is the main site we work with (because it's so important to small businesses). Google+Local is actually one of my main specialties (I also work PPC accounts at HubShout). I've spent a lot of time researching and learning about local search, specifically with Google. I'm always happy to discuss it, and it you have ideas you're thinking about trying or want some further insight on please post it in the forum. We're all happy to help you guys out in any way possible.

This recently came up in another forum I belong to. If you look up "YEXT reviews" you will find that they do NOT have a great reputation with Business owners. I think that is a great opportunity for us, if it comes up in conversation, since in reading the reviews SBOs were willing to pay as much as $3k a month to these clowns with awful terrible results, especially with PPC... here is one very in depth review of the issues, and I have found many similar ones.. http://zacharychastain.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/yext-ripoff/ . So selling your personal services and who YOU are is the way to get around this. I never sell by beating up the competition but I do show the differences.

Thanks for sharing your research with us. The comments in that post have a lot of information on Yext too.

Eric, great feedback.