Yelp has been aggressively pushing ad sales lately and many practices have received calls and emails from Yelp leaving them feeling a little unsure about how to proceed.
Practice managers and marketers want to know, should I buy the ads or not? Will Yelp ding my business listing if I don’t? Can I be on Yelp without paying for ads? Do I have to be on Yelp, I don’t even really like them?
Here is our opinion about what you can say when Yelp calls. And they will call.
Real Conversations with Yelp
Setting up or newly claiming your business’ Yelp profile is likely to result in Yelp picking up the phone to try and make a sale—masked by an offer to help or educate you about your options. They are persistent, and will likely try more than one time to earn a slice of your marketing budget.
When talking with a representative from Yelp, I learned that Yelp wants your business to treat them like a social network. They want you to engage with users, respond to reviews, and mark reviews as useful or not. Yelp software automatically filters reviews based on quality, reliability, and user-activity on Yelp. You read that correctly—user-activity. Yelp is more likely to show the reviews of users who are more active on Yelp than that of the infrequent visitor. This can be one of the most frustrating Yelp features because reviews are not shown in chronological order and some of your newest, and best reviews, could get filtered off the page. Slow and steady wins the race, and responding to reviewers who leave a positive review and asking them to become more active on Yelp so that their review shows more prominently is a promising strategy.
How Much Should I Care About Yelp?
Yelp is the largest non-Google business reviewer on the web. They’ve done an amazing job vetting reviews, making sure they are both real customers and recent reviews.
They rank very well in Google for most local services. If you have a local service where people are looking for reviews before becoming a patron of your business, they will be highly likely to end up on Yelp, and Yelp will even show up in the search engine results when they are searching your business specifically.
You cannot afford to ignore Yelp or any other review engine!
Even if your practice is the most amazing customer-service-run business in America, you are likely to tick off a few customers from time-to-time. These ticked off people are passionately motivated to let the whole world know about how you’ve messed up, and now they have a platform.
Having several poor reviews on Yelp or Google can severely impact your online presence for the worse. For example, your service topic keywords or branded name are searched and the first thing the searcher sees is your poor star ratings in Yelp or on Google. However, if you already had 10 good reviews, these few bad apple reviews will not affect your image and will likely be viewed by potential customers as an anomaly and not the norm.
Should I Pay for Yelp Ads?
You can’t ignore Yelp, but you don’t necessarily need to pay them either. You should only pay Yelp if you believe those clicks will bring you enough qualified leads to increase your profits.
When marketing, you always need to figure out what is your best bang for your buck… sometimes Yelp is a good advertising option, sometimes it is not.
When it Makes Sense to Pay for Yelp Ads
- You have a very competitive market and you have 4- or 5-star Yelp ratings. Paying will place you at the top of the results where people are not willing to scroll down pages to look at all 10+ results.
- Yelp ranks well for your keywords.
When it Does Not Make Sense to Pay for Yelp Ads
- You have terrible reviews.
- You have no reviews and/or you haven’t claimed your business profile.
- Yelp does not rank well for your keywords.
- Your business is not in a competitive market and/or there are few if any reviews on your competitors’ Yelp pages.
- You have 4-5 star reviews and your competitors in Yelp have poor or no reviews.
What You Should Do On Yelp, Regardless
- Claim your Yelp account, keep information updated, add pictures— make it look like you want to be found!
- Build your base of reviews before you tick someone off, or if you already have some poor reviews work on increasing your overall base of reviews to even out the opinions people have about your business.
- Get more reviews—ASK, ASK, ASK for reviews from all of your customers to keep the balance and to not be punished for pushing too many good reviews to your profile. Build into your customer service a system that asks for reviews. Happy customers don’t usually think to give you a review, but they may if you ask. You cannot reward any customer for giving you a good review—but you can ASK away!
- Monitor your Yelp reviews and respond appropriately to both good and poor reviews. Give searchers a sense that you care about what people are saying and want to try to work with people to achieve a happy ending to their experience.
Want to read on the go? Download the PDF from RBMA by clicking HERE.
