Roots Unifies Store Listings and Increases Search Visibility and Customer Actions

The Challenge

The outdoor lifestyle brand Roots decided to roll out an initiative to ensure all listings were unified across the 120+ North American store base to have the store name solely as “Roots” rather than a combination of “Roots” and “Roots Canada” across more than 120 locations.  The brand knew that the work required to make this a seamless transition across the digital universe would be intensive — and that they needed to accomplish it while increasing search views and customer actions, without losing business in the shuffle.

“In order to bring in customers, we need to have accurate store data everywhere, as well as the ability to consistently update that information and ensure uniformity,” said James Connell, Chief eCommerce + Customer Experience Officer. “The manual process to manage all of this was difficult and time-consuming. With our North American “Roots” initiative happening to support our US expansion, we knew we needed to make a change in how we manage our store listings.”

The Solution

With Yext, Roots is able to update essential business information like store name, address, and operating hours across more than 100 publishers, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon Alexa, from a single dashboard. This enabled Roots to seamlessly update their more than 120 stores from "Roots Canada" to "Roots" — which included over 5,400 listings updates across the web — saving valuable resources. Unifying a brand across multiple digital platforms can introduce duplicate listings, creating customer confusion about a business’ location and identity — Yext helped Roots avoid this pain point.

“Yext made the process completely seamless,” Connell said. “We’re no longer seeing the same level of concern from local managers when it comes to their store data being inaccurate. We’re also not seeing consumer complaints coming into our call centers around out of date data. In the end, Yext didn’t just help us with the project. It helped us create a better customer experience overall — and we’ll be able to continue providing that great experience since we can update all our business information from one hub at any time.”

The Difference

“Traffic to our website coming from store listings is up compared to this time last year,” Connell said. “We’re expending less effort to maintain our data, and we’re getting better results.”

What began as a way for Roots to seamlessly unify its brand across digital discovery services is now a way for them to continue to manage its listings presence and make a positive impact on search and discoverability. With unified, comprehensive and correct listings, Roots is surfacing in Google Search results more often when customers look for outdoor clothing.

In the first six months after launching with Yext, Roots saw 27% more Google Search Views and 25% more Google Customer Actions compared to the same period the prior year.

“Working with Yext helped us to drive a stronger integration between stores and digital,” Connell said. “Now, accurate information is available to customers 24/7, and we’re seeing the impact of that in search views and store visits.”