Federated local business listing service Yext expands its platform to include calendar, staff information

Today Yext, a company that helps local businesses keep their information up to date around the Internet has announced PowerListings+, an extension to its product that adds new data categories to what companies can distribute.

If you are a small business, having your information online can drive customers, and loyalty. However, given the number of online locations where such information is contained, keeping every source up to date can be difficult. According to Yext, 40% of listings online are incorrect. That figure doesn’t include listings that are simply incomplete.

Yext’s core product is a tool that helps smaller firms update their key information quickly, from a single interface. Recently, Yext reached 100,000 paid listings on its platform.

Today the firm is increasing the amount, and type of information that a company can quickly federate to a great number of the websites that the company works with. New today, as part of the ‘PowerListings+’ product is the inclusion of calendar, menu, and staff information.

The ability to look at who works for a local dentist for example, could be key in how you select the next provider who drills your teeth.

There are tens of millions of businesses in the United States alone, making the market that Yext is operating in more than large enough to grant the firm wide growth potential. As it has already secured and monetized companies in the six figures, Yext is working to better serve its current constituency, and at once garner more total business. At a price point in the hundred of dollars per year, Yext is not working for peanuts; if it grows as it intends, the firm could easily tip itself into nine figure revenue by year’s end if it manages to double its subscriber base.

Key to Yext is its speed. As TNW noted previously:

Yext’s CEO Howard Lerman demoed the product to TNW some weeks past. We were surprised at the speed with which updates could be propagated to partner websites.

That same quickness is evident in the new ‘+’ product, as TNW observed today in a private demonstration of the new service.

Yelp, a key provider of local information, and a partner to the company, is not participating, yet, in the new service. Naturally, as the firm expands what sort of data businesses can input, third-party services must be prepared to accept that data. Partners that are not yet component to the ‘+’ service may join at a later date, after configuring to support the new information.

Yext is a company that flies under the radar in a sense, as it operates as a conduit between low-profile companies, and firms that are better known. However, its ability to generate fees from companies that likely haven’t spent large sums online is all but unique. When Yext reaches a next financial milestone, TNW will ferret out the information and bring it to you.

The company’s last round was $27 million.

Top Image Credit: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL