GEM is a very specific software service for vacation rentals and hotels. Yext is a very broad platform to manage local listings and reviews for any general type of business, so if you are looking for a broad service that is ‘just okay’ at what it does for vacation rentals and hotels, Yext is okay. If looking for a very specific solution built for vacation rentals and hotels, GEM is a much better solution. The simplest analogy is this. A car will get you from Point A to Point B and you can even haul furniture if you wish, but a truck was built to haul things. Yext is a car trying to do things a truck should be doing. GEM is the truck built to do a specific service for vacation rentals and hotels.
What is Yext?
Yext is a location data management software that automatically syncs your information across 50+ major local directories and search engines. IMEG is an authorized reseller for Yext Local Listings platform and it is supported by GEM.
Yext allows you to store, manage, edit, customize and sync information about your locations across all Yext products, including:
- Business Name, Address and Phone Number
- Business categories
- Business hours, holiday hours, photos and videos, products and services, staff bios, menus and calendars
- Address, phone number and content support in any language or address format
- In-store coupons and other mobile wallet content
- Folders, location labels and advanced search and filtering
- Bulk editing and location templates that make it easy to add new locations
- Basic roles and permissioning to ensure employees maintain the appropriate levels of access
On top of syncing your information across directories with their Powerlistings product, Yext also allows you to:
- Monitor and suppress duplicates on demand as an add on
- Monitor Listing Visiting Reporting as an add on
- Monitor Reviews as an add on
Is Yext worth it?
Yext is a great option if your business is constantly changing locations. If not, you may need software that goes above and beyond. Just simply publishing your information on major directories will barely be of any use.
If you look at it cost-wise, Yext charges an annual subscription fee of $500 just for their basic Powerlistings plan to sync your listings into directories and to update them. If you’re a small business or an agency, this is quite a bit of money just for syncing your business information, especially considering you could get the same and more for half the cost.
If you’re looking for more than just listings – features that include reputation management, duplicate suppression and widgets, this will set you back at least $1000 per year per location.
Yext is a great investment if there were no other alternatives for automated listing management or a specific platform for managing reviews specific to your industry.
Yext Benefits
Yext offers you a whole range of benefits:
- Enhanced Content Syndication – With this, you can differentiate your brand from your competition and see the impact. This option lets you showcase photos, videos, business descriptions, hours and holiday hours, menus, staff bios, product & service lists and more than a dozen other fields alongside your basic NAP.
- Website Widgets – This feature lets you drive consistency across your digital presence. It lets you sync information like social posts, staff bios, menus, calendars, and product or service lists from Yext’s Location Management Platform to your own website. Updates in Yext flow immediately to your site.
- Search Term Reporting – This feature lets you monitor the search queries for which your listings show up most often in local search results.
- Social Location Page Posting – This feature lets you post on your locations’ Facebook and Foursquare accounts directly from the Yext dashboard.
- Local Listening – This features lets you to monitor Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and Instagram content that customers generate from your locations. It enables you to respond directly from the Yext dashboard.
- Reviews API – Yext provides access to reviews across every PowerListings site which is supported by them.
- Social Page Location Data Sync – It lets you sync the location data in the Yext Location Management Platform to your place pages on Facebook and Foursquare.
- Yext’s Pages Reporting – This does page reporting for you. It tracks how many visits your local pages receive.
- With Yext’s Xone – you can put information about your stores at mobile visitors’ fingertips with Xone.Tips with relevant information like wifi password, coupons and contact information on your customers’ smartphones.
Yext pricing – this can be added on to GEM since we are an authorized reseller for 20% off Yext prices (if you are a GEM client).
| Plan | Price | Details |
| Emerging | $199/yr. | Listings on MerchantCircle,ELocal and 30 other non-premium websites only. |
| Essential | $449/yr. | Listings on Google, Facebook, Yelp and other top directories only. |
| Professional | $499/yr. | Listings on all of yext partner directories + Analytics |
| Premium | $999/yr. | Professional Plan+ Review Monitoring+ Yext Website Widgets |
So is the Service Worth Using?
- Your listings will go back to a pre-Yext stage when you cancel. This is because Yext is actually a data overlay. This means that they literally add a layer of correct information on top of every business profile they support. When you cancel the service, the overlay layer gets removed and your listings go back to what they were before. People have done a lot of research about what happens when you cancel Yext.
- You are held hostage. Because you lose all of your listing edits and changes when you cancel, you are essentially held hostage by Yext. This is a bad deal for any business. You’ve already spent an annual fee trying to correct your data and you shouldn’t have to pay every year just to keep this in sync.
- Complicated User Interface. Yext’s interface is quite complicated if you’re managing multiple locations on behalf of clients or for your own stores in our opinion.
- No Support For Additional Sites.There are a ton of sites outside Yext’s network where you may have inaccurate / wrong data. The way the Yext program is structured, they do not provide any support for you to manage data or listings outside their network. This means that they don’t truly eliminate all of the manual legwork you need to eliminate wrong business data across the web. You’re still going to have to manage a lot of listings by hand.
- No Support For Industry Specific Sites. Yext doesn’t really support large industry specific sites, like but not limited to TripAdvisor, which is key to any lodging related company.
- Incomplete Review Monitoring. Though Yext offers review monitoring, this feature is rather incomplete. For instance, you cannot monitor over three selected reviews from Yelp and Google. Also, you cannot monitor reviews on sites outside their network. In GEM, you can view everything from the past, present and future. Our platform is unlimited.
- Duplicate Reporting Isn’t Ideal. Yext reports back on duplicates once every three months and doesn’t report on all of your duplicates. In fact, this feature only reports back to you on a selection of duplicates and they don’t guarantee removal of any dupes that you flag.
- No Rank Tracking Analytics. A large part of local citation building is focused on improving search rankings in Google, especially considering that citations are the second largest factor that influence your rankings. Yext Powerlistings doesn’t offer support for monitoring your rankings in any way.
- Poor Reporting. Yext doesn’t offer great support for branded reports. This is a must if you have different stakeholders you need to report back to.
- Complicated, inflexible pricing. Want Analytics? You’re going to have to subscribe to the Complete package. But, oops, that package doesn’t include duplicate suppression. Want that? You’re going to have to subscribe to the Premium package which is going to set you back almost $1000/year. Yext’s pricing model makes it very hard to comprehend what you’re actually paying for. Add to it the fact that if you want additional sites in a network, you have a separate price for that which is also hard to understand.
- Yext’s API doesn’t give you everything. Though Yext has an API, this doesn’t provide you with all the data that they have on their dashboard. GEM API gives you all the data you need where you need we also have many pre-built widgets if you want to save the dev time and money.
Does Your Business Need Yext?
Yext is a great bet if you are looking for a non-specific solution for your lodging company. GEM was built by lodging professionals for lodging professionals to serve vacation rentals and hotels.
Why Choose GEM?
GEM is a powerful tool to help you manage your business’s reputation and improve guest experiences. We built GEM to save you time and money, but most importantly, to make more money from previous and existing guests. We can help you grow revenue by saving you time, money and lowering your marketing costs while also increasing conversion; we back this with the best customer service. GEM was built specifically for the hospitality industry by people who work in the hospitality industry to solve a problem that so many ignore.
Top 6 Things GEM Can Do for Your Business
- Save you time by managing your reputation in one location
- Save you money by taking only minutes to analyze thousands of guest feedback reviews. In minutes, you can identify problems and know which actions to take to improve guest experience. This is powered by GEM’s proprietary unstructured data text analysis and IBM Watson. We analyze: sentiment, emotion, taxonomy, keyword and relation of text.
- Grow your revenue by increasing repeat guests
- Grow your profit margin by increasing conversion
- Grow your online reputation by getting more great reviews and mitigating bad reviews
- Know more about your guests with our rich guest profiles. GEM discovers data about your guests that allows you to segment feedback by various demographics and psychographics.
