I’ve always been curious about Yext so I decided to employ it on a site that was lagging in local search results. This isn’t as scientific of a test as I would like but I’m hoping the testing conditions are able to isolate the impact of expanded and cleaned up search results for this site.
The site
- Local focused real estate site
- Overall search volume for all terms ~1200/searches month
- Very niche service
- Four years old, never been penalized, original content and no bad inbound links
The situation
Local listings suffer from two problems, duplicates and incorrect information. With this being a local focused site, overall rankings have eroded and I’m curious whether the local listing issues are the main problem. Site used to be top 10 for each of the focus keywords below but now the site struggles to break the top 20 on these terms.
There are multiple Google+ local listings for the site that have been haphazardly created over time and I found out about them shortly before I decided to run the experiment. The first part of the test I won’t worry about duplicates to see whether the signals from other placements force them to favor this listing.
After 4 weeks, I will start trying to merge listings and see what the impact is afterwards. The reason I’m not going after these duplicates earlier in the process is that I want to try and isolate the impact of Yext before working on the other outstanding issue.
The competition
High authority national sites with local landing pages and a number of new entrants into the market have crowded them out. New link velocity/acquisition has also been slower than competition.
Experiment
Test the impact of Yext by utilizing the service to synchronize listing data on existing placements and register new ones. No new links will be built and no new content will be created. Yext premium was implemented on September 15 with most listings going live by the 19th. To answer the question of whether Yext is worth the money, I will look at my average lead level from organic search and determine incremental leads x revenue per lead to see if I generate a positive ROI.
| Yext On | No Yext | No Yext | |
| Keyword | 21-Sep | 14-Sep | 7-Sep |
| Keyword 1 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 2 | 46 | 46 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 3 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 4 | 47 | 47 | 36 |
| Keyword 5 | 34 | 41 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 6 | 25 | 27 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 7 | 37 | 34 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 8 | 11 | 12 | 5 |
| Keyword 9 | 25 | 25 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 10 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | 38 |
| Keyword 11 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 12 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 13 | 27 | 25 | 5 |
| Keyword 14 | 26 | 28 | 9 |
| Keyword 15 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 16 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 17 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 18 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 19 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | 42 |
| Keyword 20 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 21 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 22 | 24 | 31 | 44 |
| Top Keyword | 37 | 33 | 18 |
| Keyword 24 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 25 | 36 | 38 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 26 | 42 | 42 | Not in Top 50 |
| Keyword 27 | 18 | 16 | 27 |
| Keyword 28 | 13 | 13 | 14 |
| Keyword 29 | 14 | 16 | 20 |
| Keyword 30 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 | Not in Top 50 |
Photo credit: zabdiel
Great test I have wondered about yext for my Tampa based fence company for sometime now. Thanks for sharing. Eric