What's the deal with Yext?
-
Ok, the "SEO" in me says don't sign my clients up for this. But their ads are EVERYWHERE. All the time. Is this bad/good? thoughts? Have you ever used Yext? I can't find a review online that I don't think is biased. Should I trust my gut on this one and pass?
-
Hi Courtney,
I support the sound conclusion you've reached. As the marketer on the project, hands-on nearly always beats automation. Whitespark's service is terrific and if you're using that and hand building citations for your clients, they have an edge over other companies who have taken the automated route, simply because someone (read: you) has maximum control over their citation profile. Great responses on this thread.
-
All good answers. It is relieving to know that my doubt in Yext could be substantiated by other valued members here. Sounds like building them myself (I use Whitesparks) is the way to go. But - it is time consuming. If I need a quick fix, I could do Yext, but I will not count on it for long term or consistency. Using it to "brainstorm" is a great idea! Thanks for the info about their advertising as well Patrick. That sure makes sense!
-
Hi Courtney,
Kudos to you in not trusting everything you read online Reviews can always be skewed, so asking around has been what I do a lot of as well. Thanks for posing the question.
Let me answer your comment about seeing their Yext ads everywhere... You see them everywhere because they are heavy remarketers. So, when you visit their website and browsed around, they dumped a cookie on your browser, essentially tracking you and wherever their remarketing campaign could place an ad to bring you back to their site with an ad graphic, they will make sure you see it. Big money spent on that type of online marketing! If you delete your cookies, then Bye Bye to their ads. Or you could disable cookies on your browser altogether if you wanted.
We've used Yext before and referred clients to them or helped clients go through their service. There were issues with some clients and others went flawlessly. It is a time saver for sure, but know it's automated and their support lacks big time. There are resources out there to find the best, most relevant directories and sites which Yext and other services like them build profiles for links, so create that link in XLS and work on them manually, unless you have a ton of clients who need listings created. Keep track of all logins in the XLS file for each client so if they ever move, you can provide to them or have easy access to info if things need updated. Yext won't make updates unless you are a paying customer as well and things tended to take a long time for those updates to occur. Same for UBL out of Charlotte... I knew some people who worked for them when I started my business.
Hope this was helpful and a solid answer to help you make a decision! - Patrick
-
I agree with Oleg. In theroy it's a great tool, but we've seen issues with it as well. It sometimes doesn't always work and it somtimes says things are "broken" when in fact the listings are correct.
What we suggest is that you use it as a "brain storming" tool for where you should build links to your local listings.
-
Manual > Yext BUT Yext take a lot less management/time/effort and will be effective in ranking small businesses.
So if you have the time and resources to hire and manage an employee/outsourcer to manually submit, claim, verify and update your listings - do that.
Yext pretty much does that but all automated through a backend. You enter your business info and Yext submits/updates the listings on all the sites (I don't know whether they have outsourcers doing it on their end or its all coded). I've found that changes take longer to update with Yext and isn't as flexible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Infinite Scrolling on Publisher Sites - is VentureBeat's implementation really SEO-friendly?
I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article. My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar. They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too. My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not. VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles? Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/ Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion. Thanks in advance! Daniel
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Daniel_Morgan1 -
Pages mirrored on unknown websites (not just content, all the HTML)... blackhat I've never seen before.
Someone more expert than me could help... I am not a pro, just doing research on a website... Google Search Console shows many backlinks in pages under unknown domains... this pages are mirroring the pages of the linked website... clicking on a link on the mirror page leads to a spam page with link spam... The homepage of these unknown domain appear just fine... looks like that the domain is partially hijacked... WTF?! Have you ever seen something likes this? Can it be an outcome of a previous blackhat activity?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2mlab0 -
How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?
I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _nitman0 -
I've purchased a PR 6 domain what will be best use of it ?
I've purchased a PR 6 domain what will be best use of it ? Should make a new site or redirect it to my low pr sites? Or I wasted my $100 ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IndiaFPS0 -
What's the right way to gain the benefits of an EMD but avoid cramming the title?
Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
Question #1 - My Cherry's Popped!
I recently acquired rights to a URL that is one of our keywords. Instead of developing a landing page with that URL and then only linking it back to the company root, I was thinking about adding a link within the company's global nav that pushes to this new URL (and new page content of course). Are there any Pros or Cons to doing it that way? Thank you so much!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GladdySEO0 -
'Stealing' link juice from 404's
As you all know, it's valuable but hard to get competitors to link to your website. I'm wondering if the following could work: Sometimes I spot that a competitor is linking to a certain external page, but he made a typo in the URL (e.g. the competitor meant to link to awesomeglobes.com/info-page/ but the link says aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/). Could I then register the typo domain and 301 it to my own domain (i.e. aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/ to mydomain.com/info-page/) and collect the link juice? Does it also work if the link is a root domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0