Yext Case Study - BAYADA Home Health Care

BAYADA Home Health Care Partners with Yext to Innovate Local Engagement for Home Health Care

Since 1975, BAYADA has been at the forefront of the home care health movement, providing care to thousands of individuals in 22 states in the comfort of their homes. “Our care continuum spans pediatric skilled care, tracheostomy care and physical therapy to home care including private duty nursing, personal care companionship for adults, and finally hospice planning and care services. It can be full-time care, transitional care from a facility to the home, or episodic in nature. Many are concerned about their elderly loved ones and need someone to stop in every once in a while to help with activities of daily living,” says Richard Ortiz, Senior Associate, Business Analytics at BAYADA.

BAYADA’s business model necessitates a two-pronged marketing approach. “We want to drive demand for home health care services,” explains Ortiz, “while also recruiting caregivers aggressively, as there is a significant shortage in the industry for a variety of levels of skill-sets and experience.” With almost half of BAYADA’s client and recruiting referrals sourced via the internet, including through organic search and social media, Ortiz is keenly aware that digital presence and mobile are key to BAYADA’s marketing success.

Local Intent Is Key to Mobile Search

“We think of mobile first here. When I started, mobile users were 40% of our site traffic, and a year and a half later they are 50% of our site traffic. It’s a huge priority for us to ensure all our digital marketing strategies revolve around mobile optimization,” Ortiz says. “Even with email marketing, for example, before you didn’t really have to worry about where people were opening it. Now, most people are on their phones, so we need to ensure that even emails are mobile friendly, if that happens to be where customers or prospects are.”

As is true for almost every business in this modern age, local search is a huge component of mobile behavior. This is particularly true for BAYADA’s business model where local intent is fundamental to its success. “For our business, search queries always involve local intent. Local accessibility takes on a whole new meaning in our business.” This is also true for BAYADA’s recruiting. “It’s not just about increasing our total number of nurses on staff to keep up with demand. It’s about having a staff of nurses with a wide range of specialties available in each local market,” explains Ortiz.

Local Discoverability Makes the Difference

With more and more people searching on various search engines, maps, apps, local directories, and social media sites, Ortiz realized BAYADA needed to make a bigger investment in its digital strategy to ensure it was reaching local customers and recruits searching for home care opportunities. “Being from an SEO background, I understood that if we wanted to increase our local online visibility, local directories would be key—both in terms of them having accurate, consistent information and having listings on all the most prominent, authoritative websites out there,” says Ortiz.” And then there are always new ones popping up. You just cannot stay on top of that—you really need to rely on your vendor to tell you which ones are the best to use,” he points out.

“Unfortunately the vendor we were using when I first started concentrated only on four—Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yellow Pages. That vendor didn’t have the API connection with the directory listings either. It just submitted changes and whenever the four websites would accept info updates that is when the changes would happen,” recalls Ortiz. “I had a conversation with our President, J. Mark Baiada, and he asked, ‘What happens if someone is seeking one of our offices, and the Yahoo page shows up, and the person sees an address or phone number that we had just changed three days prior? How soon can we get that fixed?’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t give you a time because it’s up to Yahoo.’ And he replied, ‘That is not good enough.'”

Yext’s API Integrations Offer Real-Time Updates Across 100+ Sites

This conversation is what brought Ortiz to Yext. “I had used Yext’s platform for some clients in my previous position at an agency, and I knew it was a no-brainer for BAYADA,” says Ortiz. “Yext has direct API connections with over 100 local directories and search sites, which makes updates almost instantaneous – minutes, as opposed to days. The difference was unbelievable,” notes Ortiz. Yext boasts proprietary integrations with the most prominent publisher sites worldwide, including Apple, Bing, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Yelp, so that businesses of all sizes can manage their local listings information and make updates in real-time, for one location or thousands at just the click of a button from the Yext Knowledge Engine. Adds Ortiz, “Yext was a significantly better value, and could offer us exponentially more opportunities for local engagement than our previous vendor.”

BAYADA launched with Listings for 267 office locations and swiftly saw a dramatically cleaner and more accurate digital presence with improved digital engagement. “Once we set up our account and launched our locations, we started to see movement with our local directories bringing in traffic,” claims Ortiz. “I actually have a Google Analytics tracking report that clearly shows the uptick in traffic immediately after we started with Yext.”

Local discoverability on Google, of course, is a main focus for BAYADA’s digital presence strategy, and Ortiz’s team immediately began leveraging Yext’s Google My Business updating services. “The reality is that our business is constantly changing—phone numbers or types of services being updated, et cetera. There was lots of outdated info out there,” says Ortiz. Yext helped BAYADA reconcile many sets of duplicates, cleaned up its content and categories to align with Google’s algorithm, and set up proper tracking parameters. “Once we switched over to Yext, we were able to easily consolidate that. Then when Yext came out with the Google API and piloted us on the new integration – wow, it’s even better! All of the updates happen automatically such we can rest assured our presence is always accurate and optimized, and that is just fantastic.” In just one month, BAYADA had over 4,000 visits to its site from Google My Business searches.

BAYADA Leverages Yext Pages to Innovate Local Engagement

“Once we switched over to Yext and got reliable tracking that proved what the listings were actually doing for us, I knew our next step was going to be local pages, especially when I looked at the competitive landscape. For most cases where a competitor of ours was outdoing us locally, it was because these competitors had a specific page on their website showing NAP – name, address, phone – of that office,” says Ortiz. “Once I knew pages were the next step, we began the conversation with Yext to see what they could offer for us. Yext’s offering and pricing were competitive, and they were also the only vendor that immediately sent us a mock-up of what they could do for us!” praises Ortiz. “Add to that the fact that we already had our local directory data synced with Listings in the Knowledge Engine, which the Yext team offered to help us build and connect into our internal database. The last point really clinched it for us, as we have over 300 offices that are constantly moving, numbers are changing, and I couldn’t keep up. And Yext would do it for less than a tenth of the price that my internal app development team quoted. It was again a no-brainer.”

Yext helped BAYADA create customized pages for each of its eight different practices – such as Habilitation, Pediatrics, and so forth – and supports respective branding and content variations. Meanwhile, Yext enables corporate consistency and control through its Digital Asset Manager (DAM). The effect of Yext Pages on BAYADA’s enhanced local presence was remarkable. “In just one year, we saw our Pages sessions grow 82%. This is a massive jump that didn’t happen by chance,” clarifies Ortiz. “In fact, page views keep increasing week over week. I can only assume that with the additional pages we launch, it will just keep growing.” In fact, according to BAYADA, Yext Pages contribute to 25% of leads on www.BAYADA.com.

BAYADA Uses Yext’s Unique Customization Capabilities for Specific Business Needs

The Yext’s platform’s unique flexibility for customization, including for privacy and access controls, was a significant factor in BAYADA’s decision to choose Yext. Such flexibility has helped the company cater to varying needs and digital skills of its local teams around the country. “We chose Yext because we wanted to create a system where if an office did have the time and resources to make updates and changes, it could,” explains Ortiz. “And for offices that didn’t have time, updates would just happen automatically.”

Yext’s team built out two custom API integrations into BAYADA’s internal systems, allowing seamless updates for BAYADA offices’ digital knowledge as well as pulling in the latest job postings for its Pages. “Yext’s team built out two API connections into our database so that we can effectively manage both of the central components of our marketing strategy – local customer engagement and recruiting – in one centralized digital knowledge management platform,” says Ortiz. “The first integration updates all of our basic business digital knowledge, and the second one goes back to the recruiting priority. We created an open jobs widget on our local office pages so that the top ten most recent job positions at each office location are automatically posted to its local office Pages that are powered by Yext.” Ortiz concludes, “This customization has been a huge asset in helping us ramp up our marketing success on both fronts.”

Ortiz is also excited to be making use of Yext’s Uber integration. The feature enables businesses like BAYADA to help customers and prospective caregivers travel directly from the company website to the nearest office — and engage them in the Uber app with a targeted brand experience while they are en route. “We’re using Yext’s Uber integration to be innovative in our hiring process,” explains Ortiz. “We can now bring job seekers directly from our website to our front door and brief them about our organization during the ride.”

BAYADA values Yext not just as a digital knowledge management partner but also for its people. “I love working with Yext. The people are a powerful part of why we chose Yext and why we continue to enjoy our partnership,” praises Ortiz. “Coming from an SEO agency background, I have found that the Yext team really knows their stuff, from high-level industry developments to the tiniest details of a search engine algorithm update.” Ortiz sums up, “Yext’s people are always eager to discuss and explore new developments and opportunities — they’re a true partner. It’s great to have someone on our side whom we can trust on such a basic level — it’s like having an extension of our own team.”