Our expert developers explain how to build local business landing pages in Yext, a third-party platform for information management.

Local Business Landing Pages | Industry News and Insights | Union

Leveraging Yext: Building Local Business Landing Pages

<p>Working in digital means we’re always learning how to leverage a new third-party tool or platform. Recently, a client asked us to work with <a href="https://www.yext.com/">Yext</a>, a business information management platform that allows businesses to control facts and brand consistency across over 50 major directories and search engines in one place. In addition to easy information management, having more consistent business information online helps establish a higher-ranking position on search engines and local listing websites.</p><p>Union was specifically tasked to use Yext to design and build local business landing pages in order to drive customers to the locations and information most relevant to them.</p><h2>Why local business landing pages?</h2><p>For businesses with multiple locations, creating local landing pages is a no-brainer. Each landing page functions as a unique destination that you have full control over, with custom content that’s relevant to each location or local community. Beyond just providing the basics like business address, hours and reviews, you could, for example, share renovation updates, promote upcoming events or even launch a new menu.</p><h2>Building local business landing pages in Yext</h2><p>Before this project, we typically handled any local landing pages by having our developers build custom pages into an existing website – as we did for <a href="https://union.co/work/cafe-rio">Cafe Rio</a>. In this case, we used a feature that Yext recently introduced to their platform: Pages. </p><p>Pages provide a WYSIWYG editor called Page Builder, which allows you to build landing pages for locations and events from within Yext itself. As with any other WYSIWYG editor, there were unique challenges and limits to Yext’s Page Builder, many of which we were able to work around.</p><h2><br /></h2>

<h2>The challenges of using Yext’s Page Builder</h2><h3>Relatively few modules to choose from</h3><p>Something as simple as having a two-column layout with text or images simply wasn't possible without writing custom code in an HTML module.</p><h3>Lack of design customization</h3><p>There are two base themes with the inability to create new themes. Also, there weren’t many options for customizing colors, font faces or the grid. This is essential for making landing pages unique to a brand.<br /></p><h3>Certain modules not working as expected</h3><p>We found that certain modules just didn’t work as anticipated. We tested Yext's new upcoming events module, which requires an API key. However, events that are pulled in can’t be filtered by the location you’re looking at.<br /></p><h2>Breaking free from the limitations of Page Builder</h2><p>Fortunately, with the right development experience, you can push beyond the limits of a WYSIWYG tool like Yext's Page Builder. With the ability to add custom HTML, CSS and Javascript, our team was able to extend our capabilities on the platform. This allowed us to make the local landing pages more on-brand and user-friendly in a variety of ways:</p><h3><br /></h3>

<div><strong><br /></strong></div><h3>We built SCSS templating<br /></h3><p>Yext is taking advantage of the CSS preprocessor: SCSS. With SCSS you can quickly build a design system and easily see changes to one template reflect on all of the pages using that template.</p><h3>We built custom scripts that call data from the Yext API<br /></h3><p>We were able to seamlessly tap into the Yext Live API to pull in events, reviews and other data in the format that we needed.</p><h3>We created custom layouts</h3><p>Pages takes advantage of a well-known grid system called Bootstrap. We were able to leverage Bootstrap to create custom layouts in HTML components where necessary.<br /></p><h2><br /></h2>

<h2>The end result?</h2><p>While we’re aware that Yext Pages has a lot of room for improvement, our team and the client were satisfied with the final pages. If Yext can continue to improve upon Pages, they’d have a really solid product for local landing pages. <br /><br />Is your brand interested in leveraging local business landing pages to drive qualified traffic to your locations? <a href="https://union.co/contact">Contact us</a> to discuss whether Yext or another platform would be best for your business.</p>

<p>Union is a creative &amp; performance marketing agency that creates omni-channel campaigns, unleashing creativity on a data-driven world, helping brands produce memorable, measurable and repeatable results. Obsessed with data-driven performance, we believe every marketing dollar should be viewed as an investment. Our clients expect a meaningful return and we prove the ROI of our work with quantifiable data. </p>