How Can Yelp Help Small Businesses

Are you living in fear of Yelp? Some small business owners seem to be looking at reviews and testimonials online at terrible moments than devoted to an IRS audit. This is a big mistake because Yelp has a huge impact on consumer buying behavior.

Small businesses have long relied on word of mouth to attract new customers. If you think of Yelp in words today, it’s a lot less scary. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as they trust their friends’ recommendations. 

Additionally, 90% of Yelp users say that positive reviews influence their buying decisions, while 93% of review site reviewers say they end up buying their products from the companies they research. Yelp will help you in managing your small business perfectly.

What is Yelp?

Yelp is a social network that allows users to write reviews and rank companies. If you go to a new restaurant and have a good experience, you will not keep the place a secret. If you are a small business owner, you are probably already familiar with Yelp. A consumer-generated referral page with more than 115 million reviews and 145 million users each month is the first step for potential customers looking for reliable information about a new store, restaurant, or service. 

This is also the first step for angry or dissatisfied people who want to comment on new business experiences they thought were negative. Yelp was also criticized in lawsuits for aggressive advertising sales practices, fired in 2011. Like it or not, almost every small business owner now has a Yelp business page. With 142 million unique users per month, Yelp is one of the most popular internet marketing websites competing with Google and Facebook. However, Yelp is one of the best ideas for small businesses.

Yelp for Small Business

Take Your Business One Step Further

The first step for small businesses on Yelp is to apply for your business page (if you haven’t already). You can use the site to upload photos, add external links to your website and social media profile, and add important information such as phone numbers, menus, opening hours, and special offers. Most importantly, by submitting your page and creating a Yelp account, you can respond publicly and privately to customers who have written reviews about your business.

Create a comprehensive business page by adding all the information your prospects might find useful. Images are important. Beautiful graphics are a powerful and easy way to make a positive first impression.

Recommendations For Responding To Reviews

You may be impatient to answer this one-star reviewer by a noob. You might want to give something to the person who wrote this amazing essay review. However, when responding to Yelp reviews, it is important to include past and future feelings and empathy with your customers.

Yelp can respond publicly and privately to reviews, and you should take advantage of this feature when interacting with any type of customer. Regardless of the nature of the review, insightful responses will make your customers feel they are worth listening to.

opinion-reviews-evaluation-rating

Handling Reviews

Positive reviews

For positive reviews, a simple “thank you” sent privately is a good approach. You don’t have to spam public thank you pages for every positive review unless you’re over the limit, but it’s important that these customers are happy with the time it took to review your business. I don’t want to give a gift or do anything else. It can sound like spam or crazy.

Negative reviews

Negative reviews require a more careful approach. Take a breath first. Do your best to be in the reviewer’s shoes (which can sometimes be difficult). Think about their feedback. They are generally classified into one of three groups:

  • Problem-they didn’t like your tomato soup
  • Constructive Criticism: They love your product but think your music is too loud.
  • The attack or troll-restaurant is the worst place in the world.

Yelp Advertising

I think you can get a great Yelp platform by investing your time only on the free features of your website. Companies operating in competitive industries can test ads to see if they can drive traffic. If you work with Yelp, don’t spend more than you need to test your channels and relationships. Take the time to be grateful-don’t let them put pressure on you. Communicating with a member of your sales team can be very helpful in solving problems (wrong address, etc) They want to make money from your business.

Get More Feedback

You might be wondering if there are any tips or tricks for getting more positive reviews. The answer is no. Positive reviews should be a natural result of your interactions with your customers.

We do not recommend requesting reviews, and Yelp strongly prohibits offering them to customers in exchange for reviews. They should be natural and you won’t want to have confidence in your customers. You need to make it easy for satisfied customers to find your Yelp page and provide feedback. Yelp provides icons for websites and Windows stickers, and you need to make sure your social media profile and customer posts are linked to Yelp.

Get More Feedback

Get a Higher Response

As with many things at Yelp, you can’t pay for the company to grow. Also, unless the customer specifically searches for the company name, company type ads are sorted by the customer’s chosen location by default. The Yelp algorithm is also a big mystery. That said, no one knows how and why one company is superior to another, except for a company (e.g. if you search for a zip code and the top list is below the website then the other).

However, there are a few things you can do to help your business rank higher than its competitors. It’s about buying ads and building awareness.

Increased Exposure

Yelp ads are all about impressions. The more reviews you have for your business, the more it will appear on Yelp listings and search engines. To stay ahead of the competition, your game plan is to get more reviews than they do.

Getting as many listings as possible can help boost your visibility on Yelp, voices Brandon Seymour, SEO analyst, and owner of online marketing agency Seymour Consulting. This is especially true of search engines. The more Internet reviews and reviews from a company, the more customers will see them when they search on Google.

Announcements and Yelp Deals

If you made a change or update to your company or its products, it’s a good idea to spread the word through the Yelp owners’ page. Announce the winter sale or the new sushi menu that you’re recently put together, telling customers that the best time to pay you a visit is now. The Yelp announcement tool provides a convenient way to attract new clientele and number existing customers. The only step required is crafting an announcement and publishing it on the page. 

Another tip along the same lines involves increasing your deals and offers for those who discover you through the review platform. You can offer buy-one-second-free specials, loyalty cards, or discounts on products to new customers. Anything that tempts or encourages your customers to check out your business is worth a shot. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can try hosting a Yelp Deal.

Yelp Deals? These are deals that people can claim only through the Yelp platform. The benefit of running these discounts is that Yelp will promote them to a wider set of audience to bring more revenue for your company. It also means you’ll get more traction on your Yelp page. Although it doesn’t cost anything to run a Yelp deal, you’re going to pay a commission or every sale you make through the platform. It’s the same as running ads on the platform, but deals get a better overall response due customers’ thinking that they’re going to save money by taking advantage of the offers. 

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now better understand how Yelp works with small business owners and make the right decisions. Yelp is the best review site for local businesses. Participating in Yelp not only helps you attract new customers, but it also helps you understand exactly what your current customers think of your business and how you can improve it.

Also, the Yelp page can increase your overall online presence, from how high your search engine business rates are to how easily your customers can find your location and contact information. Also, make sure you’re not working on Yelp blindly – make use of the Yelp dashboard to measure pull off the curtain from the metrics associated with your business. One of the top KPIs to track is the amount of times your business shows up in Yelp search plus the traffic your Yelp profile generates. Lastly, make sure to look at user actions to get an idea of how customers interact with your page.