Has Yext recently told you there’s incorrect or missing information about your business online? Yext has been sending reports to small business owners claiming that they aren’t listed on certain sites. These reports contain the alleged “results” of a scan of your business’s directory listings. They are completely inaccurate. Their sole function, at best, is to be a misleading sales tactic. Yext’s PowerListings scan tells you your business is not listed on major sites like Google, Bing, Yelp, and Yahoo (among many others). However, if you take just one or two minutes to search for your business on these sites, you’ll see that you are, in fact, listed. It’s insanely easy to debunk these reports. Yext is hoping an official-looking “report”—peppered with big, red letters and intimidating alerts—will scare you into signing up for its services. Don’t fall for it.
What’s a PowerListings Scan, Anyway?
As part of its services for small businesses, Yext submits its clients’ information to a network of online directories. The vast majority of local SEO companies do this, as well, because directories are integral to local search optimization. However, Yext calls its own brand of directory listings PowerListings. To get you to sign up for PowerListings, Yext will conduct a “PowerListings Scan” for your business. The results appear in a grid so you can see which sites you’re listed on and which sites have accurate information about your business. Unsurprisingly, these results typically claim less than half of your listings are “optimized.” Here’s an example that came directly from one of our clients*:
*Business name redacted for privacy.
A representative from Yelp may contact you with this report. A portion of the e-mail might look something like this:
“As you saw, [insert your business name] has a variety of incorrect and missing information on our partner sites. I can fix this for you and offer you some discounts on our services!”
It has the potential to be an effective sales pitch—but only if you fall for it.
Debunking Yext’s PowerListings Scan
Again, it’s simple to prove Yext’s scan report wrong. To show you how easy it is to do for your own business, we submitted a scan of Prospect Genius via our Yahoo listing (Yext and Yahoo are partners). In the very brief video below, you’ll see our scan results and—gasp!—a few listings Yext claims don’t exist.
In the video, you see us:
- Highlight where the report says our Google listing does not exist.
- Navigate straight to our Google listing, which obviously does exist.
- Do the same thing again with our Whitepages listing.
(We could’ve easily gone into every single listing, but we wanted to keep this video short and sweet.) To run this check for your own business:
- Choose any of the websites where Yext claims you aren’t listed.
- Go directly to these websites.
- Search for your business name or phone number.
If you’re a Prospect Genius Core or Premium client, or you’ve signed up for Directory Dominator, then your listings should appear with no problem. Having trouble finding your listings? Don’t hesitate to call us for help.