Good news, everyone: you can now whitelabel the URL when you email your clients tasks using Content Capture!
With our recently released Content Capture tool, you have the option of emailing your clients directly and having them complete content-input tasks normally reserved for the customer dashboard. Completing these tasks improves their optimization percentage (visible as the progress bar in your Partner Portal) as well as the overall completeness of your client's listing.
To email a client tasks, open your Partner Portal and click on a progress bar for one of your clients:
You'll see a full list of all possible tasks for your client to complete in the course of using Content Capture to set up their listing. Select a subset of tasks (or an entire block of tasks) with AT LEAST ONE of those tasks currently "incomplete". If you choose only one task, you can send that task alone to your client. If you prefer, you can send a batch of tasks to a client at once by selecting and then clicking "Email to Client" at the top of the list.
You can also toggle which tasks are always/never present in a client's first exposure to Content Capture. From the Partner Portal, click the “Content Capture” tab at the top. You should see a full list of all onboarding tasks for Capture. You can either change tasks from being “Account Setup” to “Recommended” or “Disabled”. Recommended will remove the tasks from the initial Content Capture run-through, but they can still be emailed to the client using the process outlined above. Disabled will remove the task from the Content Capture wizard as well as from the completion process entirely. A common step partners will want to disable is asking the user to download the Yext mobile app.
For more information about the Content Capture and onboarding tools, please see Optimizing Your Client’s Local Content Using Yext’s Partner Portal Tools.
Up until now, the URL in the email Yext sent was keyed to yext.com — something a number of our whitelabeled partners were unhappy with. So now, if you have whitelabeling enabled, you have the option to use a custom, non-Yext URL in that email!
Instead of Yext, the URL will appear to be from your subdomain of http://optimizelocation.com/ — fully masking Yext’s involvement from your service offering. For example, if you are OrangeDoor SEO, your emails will link your clients to http://orangedoorseo.optimizelocation.com/users/tokens/#HASHTAG# once you’ve turned this feature on.
To do so, click on the Branding tab in your Partner Portal. Then, click on “Onboarding Pages Only” in the right-hand pane. A field should open up with a checkbox and a space for text entry. Select the checkbox (that is, make sure it is checked) and click Save at the bottom of the page.
Now when a link is generated in the Partner Portal or an email is sent out on your behalf, it will use the optimizelocation.com domain rather than yext.com
If you're interested in learning more about whitelabeling and how you can enable it for your business, please reach out to your Partner Developer directly!
The primary limitation to the whitelabeling feature has to do with social media connections.
Because connecting to a social network (Facebook, Google+ or Foursquare) requires authorizing our Yext integrations, which are certified with our yext.com domain, we cannot serve the Connect to Google+/Facebook/Foursquare tasks from the alternate domain. As such, if you are concerned about whitelabeling for clients to this extent, you will need to connect these clients’ social media accounts for them.
Also note that the mobile app cannot be whitelabeled at all.
To make these limitations as clear as possible for you and/or any agents at your firm, we’ve included labeling on these options in the Partner Portal.
Last, if you try to email certain tasks to clients, a pop-up window will warn you if any selected tasks are not able to be whitelabeled.
It might not be immediately obvious why working to get your client’s listing to 100% optimization might be valuable. After all, what does adding menus or calendars have to do with local search rank?
The answer is this: a more complete listing helps you in two primary ways. First, complete listings better address the Moz top 20 local search ranking factors, improving your clients’ discoverability. Second, the more complete your listing is, the more engaged and relevant you are to passers-by searching for your business.
We recently wrote about how Yext solves many local search problems for you in a relatively simple, painless way. Category associations, for example, are a required element of a Yext listing, and Yext has a team dedicated to matching Yext’s category options to each publishers’ categories. This ensures that your clients’ listings have categories on every site that they’re listed on — categories that are most relevant to their business. As Miriam Ellis writes in her Illustrated Guide post on Moz, “If you wish to appear in the local results for a search like “dentists in denver”, your business must be categorized as a dentist.” Wrong categories ensure total undiscoverability of your clients’ businesses. Picking and prioritizing categories in Yext can be the difference between search dominance and search obscurity.
While Yext’s primary selling point is tied to a number of the other top ten factors — quality, quantity, and consistency of structured citations, category associations, et al — the extended content supports and deepens the bare-bones listing into something more meaningful to searchers. Optimizing purely for search is only valuable to a point; in order to maximize the value you deliver to your client, fully optimizing their listing is key.
Why? Because search is only half the battle. Businesses lacking enhanced content, such as store hours, photographs, accepted form of payment, and/or videos, are leaving money on the table. Your clients need to be more than just found, they need to be patronized, and turning digital traffic into foot traffic requires the client engage with their customers. Showing off pictures, encouraging testimonials (i.e. reviews), photographs of product offerings or the business interior, and so forth are intangibles that add incredible value to your client’s listing. This content demonstrates a savvy understanding of what the customer wants and needs to know about the business by presenting them with relevant information, just in time.
As always, if you need help with whitelabeling or determining how to email clients, contact your Partner Developer, partnersupport@yext.com, or ask in our forums.