Integrating Uberall and Umbraco CMS: Driving Business Results Through Smarter Technology Solutions

Technology is changing the way we do business and the tools we use to get there. By leveraging the power of smarter technology solutions, businesses can drive business results and maximize their potential. The integration of Uberall and Umbraco CMS is an example of this, connecting two powerful business tools to drive even better results. This blog post will discuss what Uberall and Umbraco CMS are, how to integrate the two technologies and the benefits of this integration.

Understanding Uberall

What is Uberall?

Uberall is a cloud-based location marketing platform that helps businesses manage their online presence across multiple directories and search engines. The platform provides tools to help businesses optimize their online presence, update their contact information and location data, generate customer reviews, and track website performance.

It also offers digital marketing services to help businesses reach customers through organic search, local search (local SEO), and paid search. It was established in 2013 in Berlin. This company grew from a small team of four people into an international company of over 100 employees, with Forbes 500 clients including The Marriott Hotel Group, Vodafone, and 1&1.

What does Uberall do?

So, what major functionality does the Uberall platform support? Let us define the most important of them.

Location Management

As the locations listing platform, it allows businesses to manage and update their local businesses in an easy manner. More than 100 directories and search engines such as Google, Apple Maps, Facebook, and Foursquare are available inside. It also has dozens of national and regional networks. Actually, the system contains the major entity “Location” which is correlated with physical business location (e.g. store). It is possible to add addresses, working hours, photos, videos, and many more.

Digital Presence Optimization (Local SEO)

Through this feature, businesses can optimize their digital presence to ensure that their listings are accurate and up-to-date, as well as visible on local search results. Here is the excellent result of how the local businesses are displayed in Google SERP.

Reviews and Ratings (Reputation Management)

Uberall's review and ratings feature helps businesses to monitor customer feedback and manage customer interactions. It is possible to answer the customer via Uberall directly through the separate tab “Customer Feedback” which aggregates all the feedback for all locations, e.g. from Google.

Online Scheduling

Uberall's online scheduling feature allows customers to easily book appointments with businesses.

Analytics

Through its analytics dashboard, businesses can track the customer engagement and measure their location marketing success.

To wrap it up: Uberall is a great tool if you want to manage all your local business in one place.

Understanding Umbraco CMS

What is Umbraco CMS?

Umbraco is a free and open-source flexible content management system (CMS) built on Microsoft’s .NET framework using ASP.NET and is written in C#. It is used to build websites and other applications that require content managed securely and reliably.

Umbraco is highly customizable, with a wide range of features and packages. Umbraco is known for its flexibility and scalability, and it is often used for building large, complex websites. It's easy to manage without technical skills and augmentable with various plugins, so UKAD as a registered Umbraco partner widely utilizes Umbraco for many purposes.

What does Umbraco do?

Here is the list of major functionality in Umbraco.

User-friendly content editing

The major feature is, of course, an intuitive interface for creating and managing website content. The content can be posts or blogs, pages, products, locations and any piece of information.

Customizable templates

Umbraco uses ASP.NET MVC, which allows developers to create custom templates and layouts for the website.

Flexible content modeling

Umbraco's document type editor allows developers to create custom content types. Besides, there is a built-in media library - hence, it is possible to manage any type of media: images, video, files, etc.

Multilingual support 

We do like Umbraco's multi-language. It is very easy to translate the content from one language to another. Even more, you can do it in the same window.

Workflow and permissions 

Permissions are usually the pain of most applications. Fortunately, Umbraco has built-in support for managing access and permissions. You can create any role with high-level or granular permission.

E-commerce 

Umbraco supports e-commerce and provides a lot of packages to integrate different payment gateways. You can use the “out of the box” package, say, Vendr. Or you can create custom integrations with PayPal, Stripe, etc. using their API.

Search engine optimization 

Umbraco has built-in SEO support but it is better to extend it via any package - paid or free. How to cook SEO in Umbraco CMS you can read in “Your Pocket Guide To Umbraco SEO”.

Strong developer community 

Finally, Umbraco has a large enough and active developer community, which provides support, documentation, and a wide range of third-party add-ons and packages. Even more, our UKAD developers contribute to the Umbraco community as well!  

Tip! Do you know if it is possible to build a Learning Management System (LMS) in Umbraco? Read more details about what we achieved in UKAD.

Integrating Uberall and Umbraco 

How to Set Up Integration

Integrating Uberall and Umbraco assumes connecting the two systems so that information can be shared between them. In the recent project, our main goal was a one-way solution when the Uberall data is taken to populate data in Umbraco CMS.

Look at the major steps to join both systems.

1. Register for an Uberall account. To become a user, you have to create an account on the Uberall website. It is better to communicate with Uberall support to help to set up the account.
2. Create a new API key in Uberall. Once you have an account, create a new API key in the Uberall platform, required to authenticate the connection between Uberall and Umbraco. You can find the “API keys” menu in the platform header.
3. Create a “Location” entity in Umbraco. You have to create this entity in Umbraco with similar properties to Uberall. The important thing is it should have the “Uberall location id” property. It's a unique ID value used to relate locations in Umbraco and Uberall. 
4. Endpoints integration. Go to Uberall API documentation to get the list of all possible endpoints. In our recent case, we used the “Get a Location” endpoint and several others. 
5. Test the integration. When everything is ready, you have to test the integration to make sure that data is flowing correctly between Uberall and Umbraco. It may involve creating test content in Umbraco and checking to see that it appears correctly in Uberall, or vice versa.

How to Use the Features

Let’s describe how synchronization works from the user's perspective to receive the business goals.

Location synchronization works in two ways: manually and automatically by webhook.

Manual synchronization

There is a “Force Uberall sync” toggle on the location level in Umbraco CMS. When it is activated, clicking on “Save and publish” sends a request to Uberall and gets the location data. As a result, the node will be pre-populated by location data from Uberall.

This method is used as a reserve and during the first data population for locations.

Webhook method synchronization.

It is a preferred method because it doesn’t require user involvement.

Basically, when the location is updated in Uberall, this event generates a webhook. A webhook delivers location data from Uberall to Umbraco. That’s the magic!

As a result, businesses get the same location data in Uberall and Umbraco. 

Benefits of This Integration

Integration between Uberall and Umbraco can achieve several benefits for your business, particularly when it comes to location synchronization.

Improved accuracy of location data

By syncing location data between Uberall and Umbraco, you can ensure that your location information is always up-to-date and accurate. It improves the customer experience and increases the chances of being found by customers searching for your business as well.

Increased efficiency

The automatic process of updating location information saves your money! You save time and reduce the risk of errors of manual data population. It increases efficiency and reduces the workload of your team.

Also, if you’re managing hundreds or even thousands of locations, the integration will make it easy for you to manage all your stores from one convenient platform.

Better customer engagement 

By providing accurate location information on your website, you can improve customer engagement and increase the chances of customers visiting your business.

Enhanced local SEO 

With accurate location information you can improve your local SEO and run marketing campaigns with precious targeting on specific geographic areas.

Better management of locations 

By syncing location data between Uberall and Umbraco, you have better management of locations, like creating, editing, and deleting locations.

Conclusions 

Local businesses must have attractive, consistent, and correct profiles for their business locations to ensure they rank highly on search engines.

That’s the place where both Uberall and Umbraco can help. By syncing location data between the two systems, businesses can ensure that their location information is always accurate and up-to-date. It improves the customer experience, increases efficiency, and enhances marketing efforts. Furthermore, it allows better management of locations, like creating, editing, and deleting locations — no stress if you have hundreds of locations. By automating the process of updating location information, businesses can save time and reduce the risk of errors. 

Overall, integrating Uberall and Umbraco can be an effective way to improve the online presence of a business and increase customer engagement. And we in UKAD can help you with this integration! Write to us if you have any questions.