Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Yext PowerListing Scoring Gets Worse When Listing Gets Better?
Yext Power Listing tool has often been useful to me to find bad NAP. I would caution others though that it is primarily a selling tool not a diagnostic one. And one that seems to be manipulated to increase your sense of discomfort EVEN when there is improving NAP.
By Yext’s measures 18 Listings improved, 4 stayed the same with totally wrong name, 6 had the right name or close to the right name and showed no change between October and now.
Yet in October 2014 it was scored at 37% error rate at Yext and in March 2015 it was scored with a 61% error rate DESPITE improving NAP (around the locations new name).
Go figure.
Still Bad, No Change
Yahoo
Mapquest
Merchant Circle
LocalDatabase
Local Pages
Improved
Yelp (bad listing removed)
Super Pages
CitySearch
Local.com
FourSquare
DexKnows
eLocal
CitySquars
Yellow Moxie
Tupalo
Avantar
YellowBot
Where2
Chamber of Commerce
AmericanTowns
Factual
Yasabe
GetFave
OK, no change
Facebook
Bing
White Pages
Mojo Pages
Co-Pilot
8coupons
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
10 Comments
Glad to hear you find the scan a useful diagnostic! We agree and want to be clear that it’s a marketing tool that helps businesses get a snapshot of their digital presence. We list the below description of how the error rate is calculated on the scan results page:
“The error rate is an estimate of the percentage of listing views that contain an error. A listing is determined to contain an error if the name, address or phone number from our partners does not match the information supplied. In order to account for traffic differences between publishers, essential publishers are weighted 10 times as much as our emerging publishers.”
As a market leader with 60+ publisher integrations, there are rare instances when API’s aren’t responsive. Similar to hosting uptime (something I am keenly familiar with) we cannot guarantee 100% hit rate. We clearly call this out on the scan page as well.
Hope this helps explain the scan tool to your readers!
Raj Nijjer
Raj
It does explain the scan tool, it doesn’t explain why there would be a “decay” over time.
If you can’t access a vendor listing because of issues with the API why do you count it as a negative in the score then?
See? This is why I love Yext! It lets me know where a business’s listings are, so I just open them up, clean up the information, find duplicates, see the various ways a business name is spelled/organized, find old addresses and phone numbers to delete extra listings, and make sure everything is handled with one nice and clean listing with correct information is available on each directory. I haven’t paid them a penny, and it’s helped our church out tremendously 😉
I have tried a few different listing scanners like Yext’s but none of them seem to be very accurate.
Yext is a great tool for local business but the results it has been giving is not completely correct. It needs to check manually the errors it’s showing.
Sometimes it shows wrong phone number added when the correct number is added as the 2nd phone number. I agree with you Mike, the tool needs more development.
I think Yext scan tool is a nice, convenient start but agree that it is not the end all. Thanks Mike for pointing this out.
Unfortunately, or fortunately if you work in this business, you still have to do a lot of hard work and manual checks. Duplicates and incorrect information are always cycling around .
@Raj… not so sure your explanation makes sense in any appreciable way.
I would feel better about the tool if I didn’t get a marketing phone call the day after using it every single time. I understand that it is a marketing tool, but goodness gracious.
I agree with Mike. Furthermore, all my experiences with this company have been suspect. I would rather clean up my listings manually then deal with them.
I purchased Yext for Yahoo only (i.e., the one-listing plan) because I couldn’t find another way to get our business listed again in Yahoo’s local search results. At one time, our business had a Yahoo Enhanced listing, but for reasons I won’t bother going into, I had it deleted, leaving us without a listing. Yext created a nice Yahoo listing for us, but there are some issues: (1) In addition to the Yext-produced listing, a duplicate listing exists that I don’t believe was there before. All our five-star Yelp reviews are on the dupe, not on the Yext listing. Also, the dupe contains a mixture of current and outdated business information. Yahoo’s support people tell me that the dupe is marked for deletion in their system but that this could take a long time because their databases are messed up. To avoid complicating matters, I haven’t even addressed with them yet how to add the Yelp reviews to the Yext listing once the dupe disappears. (2) The new Yext listing ranks a consistent #10 in the local search results for the relevant keywords, whereas the old Enhanced listing’s ranking varied but always was in the top three. This may partially be due to the absense of Yelp reviews. (3) Trying to straighten out an issue with a Yahoo listing is a nightmare because you potentially have to deal with four different entities: Yahoo, Aabco, Yext, and Yelp. In this instance, I had the best luck going to Yahoo directly. But I submitted multiple requests before getting a response and am still awaiting resolution. By the way, I normally maintain all business listings manually and rarely pay for a listing. In this instance, I decided I needed Yahoo, primarily for the back link the listing provides. But I would never again pay for Yext or any other service like it.
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