Building My Business As A Yext Certified Partner

It's been about a year since I signed on as a Yext Certified Partner (thank you Alex Wise, Isaac Gustafson, Leah Levitte, and Rev Ciancio), and if you've been following along with my LinkedIn blog posts you may have read about the measurable successes that my clients are enjoying as a result of incorporating Yext into their digital media mix.

We've taken clients who've previously had very little or no local search visibility and helped them to dominate the map and 3-pack results. We've seen search visibility increases, phone traffic increase and conversion increases--Yext has done a great job for our clients driving leads in several verticals. In 2018, my Company was proudly featured as a Yext Showcase Certified Partner.

For the uninitiated, Yext is wonderfully designed SEO software that improves online visibility with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Alexa, Siri and about 100 other services. It does this in its core offering by synchronizing the name, address and phone number of your business across the world's most authoritative websites and then 'locks' the data so that it cannot be changed without client approval. This synchronization ensures that the same information appears (everything from whether the i's are dotted to the t's are crossed) across the web. The uniform listings (known in the SEO industry as 'citations') are interpreted by the search engines as being more accurate. The search engines like to return accurate data first.

It's widely accepted that if want to grow your business, you want to be prominently visible in the search results. Let's say you own a "Hearing Aid Store." If someone need hearing aids and queries a search engine for "Hearing Aid Store near me" you want your business to be the first listing, right? That's what Yext does. It's that simple.

Yext is ridiculously inexpensive for all that it does. The standard Knowledge Engine Professional package is only $500/year for a single location. Layer in reputation management and the investment is $1000 per year. It only takes a couple of sales over the course of the year as a business owner to recoup the modest investment.

If you're reading this and thinking you want to be a Yext Certified Partner like me, you might be wondering how do you make money offering such a simple, low-cost service? For you, I will let you in on the secret to my success with Yext.

There are 2 ways that we make money with Yext. And neither of them involves marking up the software.

The first is the setup for which we charge $1500. We've found that the Yext software is fairly intuitive and can be managed by the medium to advanced do-it-yourselfer. On the other hand, there are some that prefer having the setup handled by a certified and trained professional. Through our training and experience we have gotten very good at ensuring that our clients get the most visibility out of their investment. Our setup includes verification of the Google My Business listing and Facebook location listing.

The other way is by simply recommending Yext to all of our clients and putting it to work for them. The truth is that we have found no other solution that offers the same online visibility benefits in one cost-effective, easy to manage, neatly packaged local SEO tool. Once the clients are on-board, we are able to provide the analytics demonstrating measurable results. This fact alone has convinced us to look at this software like no other that we have worked with. There's no better way to make a client happy than to ring their cash register.

Providing Yext to our clients is kind of like an auto-mechanic that utilizes his special tool to finely tune cars. In this case, we buy the tool and install the software to ensure the local SEO is running at peak performance. Yext is a simple way to ensure that the client is successful right out of the starting blocks.

Early client success builds client confidence, grows their business, and yes, frees up more money for additional exposure. From there we offer other services like PPC, Display Ads, Online Video, Social Media, Reputation Management, and other online consulting services at a reasonable cost. That's how we grew our business.

I'd be interested to hear from other practitioners who are using Yext, or are considering to use it for your clients. What's your experience? Hopefully it has helped you to grow your business as mine has.

In addition you are welcome to check your business' online listings yourself with our free listing scan. No salesman will call, and your data will not be shared with anyone. We promise

Your comments and suggestions are welcome, as always.

 --Gary Steel consults clients on Online Marketing and Advertising, and is Google Search, Display, Video Analytics, Yext, and Acquisio Certified. If your business could use some improved online visibility drop me a line. If you like what you've read here, I hope you will 'like' and 'share' this post, and follow me on LinkedIn.