Yelp has been around since 2004 and is the number one review site on the internet. But more importantly, 82% of Yelp users are on the site because they intend to make a purchase.
Your Yelp business reviews are going to play a big part in whether customers choose your business or go elsewhere. They’ll likely make that choice without ever setting foot in your business so you need to make sure your Yelp profile brings them in.
Let’s look at the purpose of having a Yelp page for your business and what you can do to make it work for you.
Why is Yelp so Popular?
There are several factors that all work together to keep Yelp at the number one spot for review sites. For one, it’s been around for 15 years and has a lot of momentum.
As of mid–2019, the site has nearly 200 million reviews. Its users have a lot invested in the site and they trust it’s not going anywhere.
Yelp also keeps its focus on the reviews. They keep ads to a minimum to avoid distracting from the reviews themselves. They also encourage longer reviews rather than a line or two.
Your Business Will Get Reviewed Whether You Like it or Not
You can create a Business Page on Yelp that includes information about what you offer, your address and other contact information, location details, hours, and many other things. Having all this information listed will help people find the details they want when they search for you.
But even if you choose not to set this up, people can still leave reviews about your company. Would you rather leave it up to someone else to build the narrative about your company or would you rather have some control over what people will see when they land on your Yelp page?
How to Get Good Reviews
Yelp reviews have a rating from 1 to 5 as well as a written component. Maintaining a 4-plus rating is important if you want to generate new business from Yelp.
People are more likely to leave a review when they’re unhappy about something than when they’ve had a good experience. If you want to keep your average rating up, it’s a good idea to be proactive about getting reviews.
The following tips will help you do that but at the risk of stating the obvious, the most important factor is providing good products and service. If you’re not doing that, it’s going to be pretty tough to convince people to leave good reviews.
Promote Your Yelp Page
The simplest step you can take to generate more reviews is to promote your presence on Yelp in your business. Post signs in-store that encourage people to leave a review on Yelp, mention it when you speak to your customers, and post a link to your Yelp page on your website.
You can also post a Yelp QR code in both places to make it easy for people to get to your page. They can scan the QR code with their smartphone and it will take them straight to your page.
Leverage Yelp’s Promotional Features
Yelp offers a couple of promotional tools that can help drive customers to your business:
- Yelp Deals
- Yelp Events
Yelp Deals let you offer a special discount on your products or services to users on the Yelp site. This is a good way to get new customers through your door as well as offer specials to bring existing customers back sooner.
Yelp Events let you create a special event such as a special sale or in-store activity and then promote it to Yelp users. You can target customers who have already visited your business or people who have reviewed other businesses like yours.
The advantage of using Yelp’s promotional tools is that you’ll be targeting people who are active users on the site. They’ll be much more likely to leave a review for your business than people who have never used the site or use it sporadically.
Interact with People on Your Page
One of the most valuable steps you can take to get more out of Yelp is to respond to reviews that customers leave for your business. This is important for both good and bad reviews.
If someone leaves a good review, thank them for doing so. It’s a simple thing but when other users look at your page, they’ll see that you’re actively involved on the site and care about what people have to say.
And if someone leaves a negative review, or even a mediocre one, you should thank them for the feedback as well as offering to fix the problem if there’s anything you can do about it.
Bad reviews are going to happen. People make mistakes and unexpected problems will pop up. Being up-front about dealing with them will help minimize their impact on your business.
If someone is asking a question in their review, make sure you respond to those as well. If one person is wondering something, chances are other people are too.
Yelp Reviews Help with Local SEO
Local SEO (search engine optimization) will help your website rank higher in Google for the important terms potential customers would be searching for. You have a separate profile on Google, called Google My Business (GMB), where you can enter a lot of information that’s also on Yelp.
But Google uses Yelp reviews as a factor in determining how to rank your business against other local competitors. If you have better reviews, that’s going to count in your favor.
Google also uses the information you enter on Yelp as a secondary source if anything is missing from your GMB profile.
Ignore Yelp Business Reviews at Your Peril
You may not use Yelp yourself but you can’t afford to ignore your Yelp business reviews. Customers will leave reviews there whether you like it or not so it’s important to get your Business Page set up properly and start managing your reviews as much as possible.
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