After solving one of the biggest issues with local business listings — keeping them up to date, and easily synchronized across a variety of local services like Yelp and Yellowbook — Yext is now aiming to make those listings even more useful.

Today the New York City-based company is launching PowerListings+, an upgraded version of its existing PowerListings product that will let companies add information like staff bios and product descriptions directly into their local listings.

Yext already lets companies manage their core business information, like their address and hours, from a single location. But with PowerListings+, it’s bringing additional listing information that’s never been easily accessible before to listing providers like Yelp.

“Today [local search] is all about the where… But we don’t think that’s enough, we don’t think that creates the best local discovery experience,” Yext chief executive and co-founder Howard Lerman said in an interview with VentureBeat. “[PowerListings+] enables a business to go beyond the “where” and answer the who, what, when directly on their business listings.”

A doctor’s office could list all of its nurses and doctors with a PowerListings+ Staff Bio, or a yoga studio could list its classes using the Event Calendars listing. Companies can also list detailed descriptions of their products and services, and of course, restaurants will be able to add their menus. This is the sort of information that’s typically found on a company’s website, but those are rarely easy to use when you’re on the run (especially if they’re not even formatted for mobile devices).

Companies can add the new data into PowerListings+ manually, via a spreadsheet, or they can choose to have Yext crawl their website to grab the information. Lerman describes the website crawling feature as “semi-automatic” — some of it is handled automatically, but then a Yext employee combs through the data to make sure it’s correct. Eventually, Lerman says Yext will let companies use their local listing data to power a website, if they don’t have one already.

“This is a pretty big advancement,” Lerman said. “This next layer of data doesn’t exist in the world in a structured format way very well, it’s scattered all over the place. It doesn’t exist in most publisher indexes in a structured way… It’s our vision to be the authoritative global gateway for location information between consumers and businesses, so the more data we have, the more value we have for publishers…”

Yext just recently raised $27 million in a fifth round of funding, bringing its total to more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others. The company sold off its pay-per-call business last fall, and it’s now focusing entirely on local listings.

Yext, the New York City-based company that lets businesses manage their online listings, announced today that it has sold off its pay-per-call ad division (recently spun-off as “Felix”) to IAC-owned CityGrid Media.

Yext initially started off as a smartphone call transcription service for businesses, but the company eventually saw a greater opportunity in its PowerListings product, which lets businesses manage their information across 50 online publishers. Now Yext will be able to focus on PowerListings completely, and it will spend “every penny” of the Felix sale proceeds to power the new product, CEO and co-founder Howard Lerman wrote in a blog post today.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that it was around $30 million. Yext just recently raised $27 million in a fifth round of funding, bringing its total to more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others.

In addition to being good news for Yext, Felix will likely be a great addition to CityGrid Media, which runs popular local business sites like Urbanspoon and Citysearch.

The sale was inspired by advice Lerman received from venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, after he passed over investing in Yext with legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Horowitz suggested selling off Yext’s pay-per-call ad business to grow the company, but Lerman thought the notion was crazy at first (especially since the Felix business accounted for 90 percent of Yext’s revenue at the time).

“A few months later, I realized that’s precisely what Ben did!” Lerman wrote. “In pivoting LoudCloud to Opsware, he sold LoudCloud’s hosting business to EDS to raise capital and achieve total strategic clarity in building Opsware.  That was maybe a crazy bet, but it turned out to be the right one.  But aren’t the best bets [always] the crazy ones? I set the wheels in motion to find a great home for Felix.”

In an interview with VentureBeat back in June, Lerman recounted the unique position Yext was in when he decided to focus on PowerListings last year: “Starting a business is a scary proposition, but it’s even scarier to bet a company that’s doing $30 million in revenue this year — and growing — on a totally unproven business model. To the credit of my team, they didn’t blink when I said we were doing something else … I’m not even sure we recognized how crazy it was [at the time].”

Selling off Felix makes sense for Yext, especially since the two divisions have literally been working on two separate floors in their huge New York City offices. Now Yext has no major distractions in its pursuit to own local business listings, a market that will become increasingly important as businesses move towards mobile payments.

Photo via Alex Proimos/Flickr