Yext Research Shares a Few Billion Data Points With SEOs
The idea behind Yext Research, of which I am an unpaid advisor/board member or something fancy like that, is to take the massive amount of local search data Yext has at its disposal, give it to some industry geeks, and share findings with the industry. Today, Yext Research released its first data study:
Best Practices Will Only Take You So Far.
I recommend reading the whole study. Here’s my $0.02:
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Local Citations in AI Results Differ Dramatically Between Different AI Models
This table tells the story:
There’s minimal overlap in citation across models when they are asked the same questions. So if ChatGPT and Google have radically different citations, then SEOs will have a lot more to do, in both good and bad ways. That’s a lot of kittens to herd. -
ChatGPT Is The Least Diverse In Terms of Local Citations in AI
Why does ChatGPT have such a relatively small set of citations compared to the others? Perhaps they understand quality better? Or does their crawler just suck? I am going to go with Occam’s Razor and attribute this to crawler suckage. Breaking down these citations by AI service and by vertical, which I hope Yext will do in a future post, should tell us a bit about this. -
This Is Just Plain Cool (for SEOs, That Is)
This shows how Google maps keywords to topics. For example, if your target keyword is “facial spa” (one of the orange dots), this graph shows that odds are you often will get “massage near me” “for free.” This data can save you a ton of work as you are plotting out your content strategy. My feedback to Yext was “this wants to be a tool where I enter my target topic and it tells me what related topics I do and don’t get for free.” I’d also want to see which ones you can’t get unless you have the right primary category. For example, an HVAC in Bend, OR could never rank for electrician queries because only GBPs whose primary cat was Electrician were ranking. -
Scale GBP Insights By Category Is The New Hotness
This data will be great as it gets more granular. “Are keywords in reviews helpful?” is a common question. If we knew what are the industries where it mattered most, that would help prioritize tactics. This release is just a baby step for Yext Research, but IMO it’s a huge step in the right direction. Should be fun to watch this thing evolve.
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