With all of this being
said, one of the main drawbacks of Yext is price.
Yext costs a pretty penny.
As a local business, you’re looking at between $500-$1,000 to buy directly from
Yext. And that’s per year. And that’s not the only problem with Yext (more on those
below).
For those of you that
don’t just have that kind of cash to throw around or want something better, we
have a different solution for you.
Before we get to that
solution though, let’s cover everything Yext offers and the benefits, as well
as some drawbacks to lay a good groundwork.
Yext has some pretty
awesome benefits that I think any subjective individual would admit to. Among
those being:
Submission
and 55 live listings for your local business within a quick time frame (72
hours)
One central
dashboard to make name, address, phone or other local business changes
Keep your
listings “fresh”
– I’ve been told by a few people now that
Yext actually doesn’t offer this to the regular consumer anymore. It’s only a
part of their “Enterprise” package. Can’t be confirmed or denied at this point.
“Enhanced
Listings” with photos, specials, etc.
Review
monitoring
Local
listing analytics
While all of these
features are pretty cool for the most part, Yext has 2 major drawbacks: price and reversion.
Yext costs a minimum of $500. That wouldn’t be so
bad except that you have to pay Yext every year and $500 a year starts to add
up fast. They also auto renew, so if you order through them, watch out for
that.
Yext also will revert your
listings back to their old status if you cancel with them. Meaning those 55
listings will either be gone (if Yext created them in the first place) or will
revert back to their old listing information if you lapse your agreement with
them from year to year. Basically, you’re renting your listings.
So, you’re more or less
locked into a lifetime agreement with them from here on out until the end of
your business if you want to keep those listings.
Are you planning on
keeping your business for 10+ years? Sure you are. Then you need to be prepared
to shell out $5,000+ over the lifetime of your business to Yext.
But what
about Yext’s features? Aren’t they worth it?
Yext’s features just don’t
really add up in the grand scheme of things in light of the drawbacks of cost
and the reversion of your listings.
Before we examine Yext’s
features even closer, let me remind you of the main benefit of Yext.
As a local business, you
want to have profiles on local search directories and Yext obviously helps with
this. But you don’t necessarily want to have profiles on local search
directories for the sake of getting traffic from these local search
directories. Why? Because unless it’s one of Bing, Facebook, Yelp, or
Yellowpages, consumers won’t be searching on these local search directories.
They’ll be searching on Google instead because these other local search
directories simply aren’t popular enough to have local customers searching on
them. Have you ever heard of 2findlocal.com or showmelocal.com? Yeah, neither
have your customers.
The main benefit of local
search directory profiles is to rank you higher on Google, the most searched
“local search directory”. Google scans all of these local search directories
and the more you have a profile on, the higher you will rank on Google (Local
SEO).
Again, just to hammer it
home: Ranking higher on Google is the main benefit of Yext.
No comments:
Post a Comment