Case Study: How Yext’s Duplicate Suppression Improves Google Local Search Ranking

You put a lot of effort into maintaining your local SEO strategy. Don't let duplicate listings quietly undo all your hard work!

Duplicate listings occur when a single location appears multiple times in a directory or database. Regardless of how a duplicate listing originates, its presence can cause irreparable damage to a business' credibility and can send mixed signals to web-crawlers that have a negative impact on citation consistency. With near me searches at an all time high, it's never been more important for businesses to have correct and consistent location data online. To give businesses a solution, Yext launched Duplicate Suppression.

Duplicate Suppression uses patented technology that leverages Yext's proprietary publisher API integrations to automatically identify potential duplicate listings, notify businesses of duplicates for review, and allow businesses to permanently suppress duplicates at the publisher database level — which is the only way to solve the problem for good.

To assess the impact Duplicate Suppression has on local search rankings, Yext worked with Andrew Shotland and his team at Local SEO Guide to conduct a Google local search rank-tracking study of relevant keywords for a casual dining restaurant chain. The 90-day study tracked Google local search results for 1,256 of the restaurant chain's U.S. locations before and after duplicate suppression, across 50 relevant non-branded keyword phrases (e.g. "virginia beach restaurants").

By using Yext's Duplicate Suppression, the restaurant chain saw a 20% increase in the presence of its locations in Google local results. The improvement in search ranking that resulted from Duplicate Suppression illustrates the importance of consistent NAP citations as a factor in Google local search ranking, whether or not the inconsistencies are a product of duplicate listings or other data quality issues.

This is the first large-scale study of its kind to demonstrate a direct correlation between the elimination of duplicate listings on non-Google sites and an improvement in Google local search ranking.

Our new report provides an overview of Google local results, an explanation of duplicate listings and their impact on local search, and a detailed analysis of the study findings. Download the report today and learn how you can remove duplicate listings for your business and improve your Google local search ranking.

Methodology
Yext tracked 55,000+ searches each week to assess the presence of the restaurant chain's locations in Google local results for each keyword phrase. Baseline data was recorded prior to Duplicate Suppression and for 90 days after. Yext conducted two rounds of Duplicate Suppression—at the start of the study and the halfway point—suppressing a total of 8,115 duplicates across 37 publishers. It's worth noting that duplicate listings were not suppressed on Google itself but on 37 publishers within the Yext PowerListings network.