If your business listing has more content, it’ll naturally see more engagement, rank higher, and perform better overall. As more searches take place on mobile devices, marketers are going to h ave to expose more local business attributes and enhanced data for discovery and competitive advantage.
Based on previous research done by Google, 50 percent of smartphone users conducting local-intent searches visit business locations within 24 hours. These numbers are even higher and more immediate for restaurants, which often see searches translate into visits within a few hours or less.
TripAdvisor found that “Restaurants with hours of operation on their TripAdvisor listing see 36 percent more engagement than those without them.” Yelp reports, “Businesses who complete their profiles see, on average, 5x the customer leads each month.”
These sites point out that the importance of images on profiles. For TripAdvisors, restaurants that have between 11 and 20 photos see “double the amount of diner interaction over others with no photos at all.” According to Yelp, “a business with 1-5 reviews and at least 10 photos sees 200 percent more user views than a business with the same number of reviews and no photos.”
Keeping this in mind, in regards to these findings and trends, Yext is verticalizing its listings management offerings. Yesterday the company released “Yext for Food,” which:
- syndicates restaurant menu data.
- expands restaurant content distribution across more partners/sites (Postmates, Zomato, delivery.com, others).
- enables enhanced restaurant data syndication (e.g., price range, meals served, attire, happy hour specials).
Other entities, such as SingePlatform, offers similar services. Not long ago, TripAdvisor added new enhanced listings products for restaurants and hotels.
Yext has launched “Yext Healthcare Knowledge Engine” and “Yext for Mortgage,” both of which focus on distribution of vertically specific data attributes and information.
These moves are a response to a rapidly changing (local) search environment and the need for more data to satisfy more specific and demanding user queries.