Newly Internationalized Yext Launches “Pages” To Help Businesses Sync Their Website Data

Yext is adding new tools today to help businesses synchronize their content and data across multiple services with the launch of a product called Pages.

Back in 2009, the company launched a pay-per-call ad service at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, but it has since sold that business to IAC and refocused on helping businesses manage their location data, first on local search and listing services like Yelp and Bing, then on Facebook too. With Pages, it’s making it easier for businesses to update their own websites as well.

To illustrate why this is useful, CEO Howard Lerman told me about being dispatched by his wife to pick up a pie, only to discover that the store in question was closed for the day. It turned out that the store’s Facebook Page had been updated with that information, but its website (which is what he had consulted) was not. Lerman argued that this reflects a broader problem, where many businesses find it difficult to consistently update their websites, so those websites turn into digital brochures.

“We want to make the web a little less static,” he said.

With Pages, Yext is offering customers five different widgets – calendars, menus, bios, product lists, and social posts. Once those widgets are embedded on a site, they can be updated from the same Yext interface as everything else, with the same information. And those updates go live immediately, as Lerman showed me in a quick demo.

The new feature also points to the company’s larger vision, which is to build a “Yext Cloud” that helps businesses manage all their marketing needs from one place. Lerman suggested that the company will continue building out the cloud with new products in this vein.

He also claimed that the company’s focus on business data and updates is already paying off handsomely. Yext will be serving 230,000 locations and have a $50 million revenue run rate at the end of this year, he said, and he expects that to double to 500,000 locations in the next year. (Lerman estimated that Yext’s customer base is half small and medium businesses and half larger brands that account for multiple locations.) And he emphasized that Yext is a software-as-a-service company, with reliably recurring revenue.

In addition, Yext is announcing that it now supports international addresses in 75 countries and 150 languages, and that it’s expanding its social features to include support for Google+.