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Author: Jenna Vasquez
Founded in 2006 as a local advertising business, Yext is unique in the reputation management software space with its search experience cloud. Its mission is to help businesses and organizations around the world deliver helpful and accurate answers everywhere that your customers search. Yext allows businesses to control the facts about their operation online starting on its own website and extending across search engines, maps, apps, etc.
Customer's expectations have made serving the facts about your brand increasingly complex. Consumers no longer want to go to your homepage and navigate from there. They start by searching or asking a voice assistant a question. And they expect your brand’s website can provide a rich, specific answer.
Yext helps businesses get accurate information to these customer inquiries across the search ecosystem. Think of it as helping businesses ensure that the ultimate source of information about their business is the business itself.
Yext’s Answers tool is a powerful search engine on your website to drive business. Yext also offers customers listings and review management tools in line with other reputation management software providers. Its Reviews tool helps businesses monitor, manage, and improve their online reputation. Yext also offers businesses its Pages tool that integrates with your website to provide customers answers to their questions quickly.
Yext has an impressive footprint. It is headquartered in New York City with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Dallas, Geneva, London, Miami, Milan, Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo and the Washington, D.C. area. Its client list includes Taco Bell, Denny’s, Marriott, Jaguar Land Rover, and the U.S. State Department.
In 2020, Yext was designated a leader on the G2 Grid for top Enterprise Search Software products joining the ranks of search greats like Google Cloud Search, IBM Watson Discovery, and Microsoft Bing.
Top Ranked Companies
The Good
- Not Just Reviews
- Natural Language Processing and Language Expansion
- Update All Online Listings Simultaneously
- Free Trial
Not Just Reviews
There is a large variation between the tools being offered by different reputation management software companies. Yext’s Reviews product is effective at monitoring, managing and improving your online reviews. It has received a lot of positive feedback on its review monitoring tool including from large companies such as Denny’s, Meineke, and FTD.
However, from looking at its online reviews, it seems that many businesses are most excited about its Answers and Listings tools.
Yext’s unique focus on searching functionality and experience can have a significant positive impact for businesses. One business reported that within six weeks of launching Yext Answers it experienced a 27.5 percent site search click-through rate.
And in one month after making the search bar on its website more prominent, it saw search volume increase by 7.1 times. Businesses will appreciate Yext’s focus on making your business the expert online to your customers.
Yext can help not only with reviews, but also by providing the accurate information and answers to your customers' questions first on your company website and then extending across search engines and voice assistants.
Natural Language Processing and Language Expansion
A critical aspect of Yext’s powerful search experience cloud is its natural language processing (NLP). It weaves natural language understanding into the fabric of all your customer experiences so that you can return direct answers to consumers' questions. It is basically the future of search.
Answers uses artificial intelligence to put text or speech into context. Unlike traditional site search technology, which relies on index-based search to catalog a website’s documents, Answers pulls data from the entities stored in the Knowledge Graph — and the relationships between those entities — to answer users’ queries in coherent, relevant ways.
One Yext customer reported that before they integrated with Yext, answers to questions about the practice such as costs of procedures, location information and other requirements were answered via phone calls to the practice front desk staff. It did not have any site search functionality on its website.
Yext Answers’s advanced natural language processing (NLP) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-powered search experience completely transformed its website. The company was able to see the questions patients were asking and answer them directly. This tool can save businesses time and money, and NLP can help patients to find the answers they need.
And now Yext Answers has expanded into four languages: French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Websites powered by Yext Answers are able to handle not only searches with complex language-specific attributes like accents and compound verbs, but also location-based searches.
Update All Online Listings Simultaneously
Searchability can get a boost when online listing information is consistent across multiple sites. Business organizations need listing information to be accurate and consistent but it can take time to continually update this across multiple websites.
Yext’s Listings tool allows business owners to update online listings simultaneously with information such as address, phone, menus, holiday hours, staff bios, and more. Yext Listings updates your facts across over 150 digital services globally such as Google, Google Maps, Amazon Alexa, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Yahoo, Instagram, and Yelp.
Free Trial
Yext can be expensive; however, it does offer a free trial. This is a nice way to try out its platform before committing to a large monthly fee. Many of its competitors do not offer a free trial, so this really helps it stand out.
The Bad
- Expensive
- Some Listings Options Irrelevant
Expensive
Yext has several plans with different pricing that give businesses different access to its platform. The plans are billed on an annual contract basis. Many online reviewers praised Yext’s tools but said that the cost is high, especially for small businesses.
Another thing to know is that if you choose to cancel your Yext account subscription, the listings that you used Yext to update across the web will all revert to their old inaccurate information. If your listings are suddenly wrong or no longer exist, this can affect your business’ searchability.
Some Listings Options Irrelevant
The Listings feature gives businesses the ability to update their information in Yext’s Knowledge Network of over 150 websites. While Google, Google Maps, and Facebook are relevant websites for almost every business, there are many websites in this network that may not be.
The Bottom Line
Yext’s Search Experience Cloud platform can offer your business powerful tools to improve SEO, help your customers get their questions answered on your website, and improve your business’ online reputation.
For those businesses that may have a limited marketing department or none at all, Yext's Listings and Reviews tools can prove to be highly time and cost effective. Is your business moving? Listings allows you to update this information across the relevant websites quickly.
While Yext may be expensive it has many satisfied customers that say the cost may be justified.
