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Yext vs. Moz Local for NAP Listings

Published:  May 4, 2017
Yext vs. Moz Local for NAP Listings

A colleague recently asked me about my impression of Yext vs. Moz Local, and I figured I'd share below what I told him.

Yext actually got in touch with me and wanted me to consider offering Yext services to our clients, and ultimately I said no. I have a few problems with Yext -- and if there is someone from Yext reading this article, I'd be happy to engage in a discussion if anything below is inaccurate. So to be clear -- I am not current customer, and this is my personal impression from speaking to the reps.


1) The sales person who called me was unable to give me details, and was also unable to (refused to) give me pricing. He wanted to setup a call with another member of his team, and flat out refused to give me pricing. At this point I told him forget it, and I was able to get some limited pricing information emailed over to me.  TBH, I'm a "get to the point" type of guy -- and I didn't like to have to get bounced around to answer pre-sales questions!
2) One of the things that Yext does is help you claim your listings to make sure that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone #) is accurate across the web. This is an important thing to have done, as it does help with Google Maps rankings on search results, and may help with rankings.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a "one-and-done" type of thing. That's not to say that you shouldn't occasionally check, but when I asked the rep why one would need to pay monthly to make sure listings haven't changed, he was evasive. He gave me the example of someone changing ownership of my Google My Business listing -- and that's not a very realistic situation.  Remember, the whole reason you need a service to assist you is because you have to get in touch and prove you are you in order to verify a listing -- Google makes you verify that you own the business before they will make any ownership changes (it's a pain in the neck -- I've worked with clients who legitimately had to change b/c of practice transitions and it was difficult even with people who agreed to change ownership!).
Their fee was in the hundreds of dollars per month, and I personally don't think one needs to spend hundreds of dollars per month in order to check that someone else might be hijacking their online NAP listings.
Another issue was that they spoke about how many directory sites they worked with. The problem I have with that is that Moz Local (see below) works with around 15 or so directory sites -- and the results from these sites "trickle down" to the smaller directory sites. To me, it felt like one of those old-school "we'll submit your site to all of the search engines" -- when you only needed to submit to two. (And now you technically don't need to submit to any SE at all).*
*you should still verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, setup Google Analytics, and claim your Google My Business listing. You should also consider doing the same with Bing.
They also mentioned reviews and some other services -- but most of my clients (if not all of them), have some type of dental-focused review service already running (Solution Reach, Bird Eye, etc).
I asked him what Yext brings to the table vs Moz Local ($99/year) and he really wasn't able to - in my opinion -- justify their fees or tell me why their service was more valuable.
In all, that's not to say that they don't offer other services that may be valuable -- but once they started with the "we can't give you pricing" bit, I was done. In fact, for every new client consultation I do, I tell the dentist the price up-front. I explain that I'm a vendor and a colleague, and then I say "this is the fee."  So when Yext stared to play the secret-pricing game, I didn't want to play.
3) For my personal sites, and for our clients, we recommend Moz.com/local (SHD has no affiliation with them).
The reasons are:
a) It's $99/year and it gets the job done
b) if you cancel with them, they won't undo your listings, but they simply won't keep checking -- fair enough. And if you did want to stay - $99/year is a no-brainer to keep an eye on your listings.
c) Moz looks at the top 15 or so directory sites (something like that), and that's sufficient considering that most directory sites get their info from "higher-up" directory sites.  (It's similar to the fact that AOL gets it's search results from Google ("Powered by Google")).
So I hope that helps. If you want to learn more, I'm giving a free webinar in July about Moz.com Local and how to update/confirm your NAP, with a little Schema.org mixed in.

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