Why Is Yelp Important to Your Business
Yelp is a local search behemoth. They’ve accumulated 200 million reviews since their inception. As of Q3 2019, Yelp:
38 million average monthly mobile app unique users
91.3 million average monthly (web) unique visitors via comScore
Averages more than 178 million unique visitors per month across mobile, desktop, and app versions
Seated an average of 2.6 million diners each month
Delivered 2.2 million Request-a-Quote leads each month
26,000+ reviews are published every minute across Yelp’s core demographics.
Yelp is an app that uses geolocation to show businesses in the user’s area. It allows users to discover the establishment’s address, contact details, and opening hours as well as visitors’ reviews.
Yelp is a service that allows people to search for things that they have interest in. To monitor and engage with customers, your business must be utilizing this tool.
No matter your small business, making Yelp work for you is important. A successful strategy on Yelp doesn’t require spending any money, and is an opportunity for your interactions with your customers to positively represent your business.
The first step for a small business on Yelp is to claim your business page (if you haven’t already done so).
Yelp is important because it is emerging as the leading consumer review site for many types of businesses and it currently receives high priority from the Google Search Engine results – generally in the top 5 based on my tests.
You want to start using Yelp for your business, it is easy. Just Visit Yelp.com and search your business. Update your business information and add pictures. It takes a few minutes but your current and future customers now will have accurate information about the business.
Promote and encourage your customers to review your business on Yelp. This is a great way (along with Google + Foursquare) to help understand your customer and provide better service. Yelp is just another tool of reaching customers and showing them you care. You’ll now be able to better monitor, track and respond to your customer’s cares, concerns and suggestions – what a great asset!
Creating such an app is a great idea that is profitable for business owners and undeniably useful for users.
Most importantly, claiming your page and creating an account with Yelp allows you to to respond privately and publicly customers who have posted reviews about your business.
Take some time make your business page comprehensive, adding any information that might be useful for potential customers.
Reasons You Should Claim Your Location on Yelp.
1. Update Business Details
As a business owner, you can update the business listing including providing details about your specialties and business history.
2. Set up special promotions or announcements.
Business owners can set up offers or announcements that appear at the top of your individual profile.
3. Review alerts
Once you have claimed a location, you will receive an email message whenever you receive a new review or message for that location. This is a great feature so you don’t have to keep reviewing your Yelp business page to look for new reviews.
4. Message reviewers
One of the most important reasons to claim your business is that business owners can reply directly or publicly to people who have left reviews on their site.
Engaging customers is one of the top objectives in social media and Yelp really helps you achieve this objective.
5. View location dashboard
Finally, the business owner gets on the number of page views for their business as well as a dashboard with links to reviews and messages.
If you claim multiple locations, your locations are available from a drop-down list to the right of your tabs.
The process for claiming a location is pretty straightforward. You click on the “Is This Your Business?” link that appears just after a summary of the location details.
When you click on the link you go to a follow-on page that says it an automated phonebot will call the number listed as the business phone number on your page and you will have to punch in the provided 4-digit code.
This is a simple process, but can be somewhat excruiating if you have more than 10 (or 30 or 300) locations to claim. Yelp does offer special business owner tools for companies with larger number of locations, but they are quite pricey (about $75 per month per location) and Yelp doesn’t put these details on their website.
After claiming the location, you are able to edit some of the information, fix the business hours, add an announcement or coupon and add your own business photos.
Now that I know what to look for in a claimed business, it is so sad to see unclaimed businesses with incomplete profiles and no pictures uploaded.
If you’re a small business owner, at this point you’re probably familiar with Yelp. With over 115 million total reviews and 145 million monthly users, the user-generated recommendation site has become the first step for potential customers looking for trusted information about a new retail store, restaurant or service.
Before spending any money:
82% of users read reviews
57% view your hours
50% view your website
48% view photos
78% always or frequently make a purchase after calling a business they found on Yelp
70% always or frequently make a purchase after mapping directions to a business found on Yelp
This is significant, especially when compared against results from other review platforms.
Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of reviews on Yelp are actually positive! They’re recommendations from satisfied customers who are looking to spread the word about your business.
So go for it!
The controversy that has yet to come to any resolve after multiple lawsuits and negative PR, are the influence of Yelp reviews, the bias of negative to positive sentiment in the filtering of reviews, and the overall impact reviews have to a local business (knowing that most online traffic now comes from what users find in a Google search result).
Advertising on Yelp
We think you can get a lot out of the Yelp platform by solely investing your time on the free page features offered. For businesses in competitive areas, it may be worthwhile to test advertising to see if it can help drive traffic. If you do work with Yelp, don’t commit to spending more than you need to test the channel—and relationship and then, take time to evaluate—don’t let them pressure you.
SEE ALSO : Why You Need A Website for Your Business
If you’re in contact with a member of their sales team, they can be a good resource to help you out with any issues you’re having (incorrect address, etc.)—they want to earn your business. Happy Yelping!