Displaying reviews on your website is, therefore, a great way to attract more customers and grow business. Customers respond to social proof. Social proof is a simple psychological concept that states that people adjust their behavior based on what other people are saying. If lots of other customers say that a restaurant has great food and great service, other customers will want to check it out.
They turn to other customers. Reviews can also help your website rank higher on Google search. Search engines love user-generated content, which can often contain phrases and links that are associated with and specific to your business. Want to display Google reviews on your website?
If you have a WordPress-themed website, all you have to do is add the widget to your sidebar. Facebook gives businesses the ability to embed reviews directly on the site. But displaying reviews from only one site may not be enough to influence your prospects. You need to showcase all your reviews — wherever they are written. You might not have time to go and try to manually embed reviews.
While these basic methods of embedding reviews are better than nothing, you can do better. Unfortunately, Yelp has racked up a questionable reputation over the years due to lawsuits that accuse the corporation of shady practices such as extortion and manipulated reviews. Horror stories of Yelp proliferate the internet, even inspiring an upcoming documentary about its alleged business practices.
Download our free retail customer loyalty success guide to learn how to drive customers back 2x more. To help clear the waters, here are 5 questions and things you should absolutely know about Yelp as a business owner.
This info will demystify the review site and let you determine for yourself whether you want to invest in Yelp as a local business. Good question. First you have to officially claim your business listing. After your store is verified, you should then make sure your page is up-to-date with accurate information, like your store phone number, address, menu items, etc.
The more information you provide, the more reasons customers have to make a visit! You can also optimize your SEO search engine optimization by adding in keywords about your business, just like you would do on a website. Positive reviews should happen organically because customers love your store! Yelp does not recommend that you ask customers to write reviews or bribe customers with discounts — huge no-no.
However, you can still attract customers to your Yelp page by putting a link to your page on your website, on your email signature, social media, and by encouraging people to check-in to your store.
The key is to spread awareness and engagement. Make your customers feel special and reap the rewards. They have to be earned. Yelp gives them out once per year according to the history and rating of each store. If you feel like you qualify, you can also try applying for one here. Business owners can, and should, reply to these reviews.
Yelp also provides an option to respond to reviews privately, which gives you an opportunity to not only resolve the issue, but establish goodwill with your customer. If this does not work out, you should respond publicly, in a level headed fashion. By explaining the situation and how you have dealt with this privately, you can make the situation work in your favor by showing that you do care about your customers.
These reviews are only accessible through a tiny link at the bottom of every business page. The short answer is no. Reviews from Yelpers with little activity, reviews from the same computer, and reviews that are too extreme on either end of the spectrum. Sound unreliable? Many legitimate reviews do end up hidden for this very reason. That depends on, well, a lot. This means it is 1,x more expensive than your average online advertising.
But, there are also arguments that suggest advertising might be worth your buck. With this information at hand, hopefully you now have a much better understanding of how Yelp works for small business owners and can make a decision that is right for you! When she's not writing for the blog, Diane enjoys reading, traveling, and eating Crunchwrap Supremes. Yelp is a scam. As a small business owner, I never heard of yelp until my franchise marketing people thought it a good idea to sign up.
I signed up both my small businesses. My take on Yelp is their software is not smart enough lacks logic and common sense to figure out a good or fake review check out their disclosure about that point. Found out that Yelp Marketing people do write good and bad reviews, even though they claim otherwise.
We have a new customer form which all new customers fill out and not 1 has ever checked off Yelp. Of the 70 yelp reviews between 2 stores, only 1 or 2 Yelpers still write reviews.
I have 3 reviewers that gave us 1 star and never written another review. Explain how that is good for business? I completely understand your concern with Yelp; I know that many small business owners express the same sentiment.
By no means am I encouraging anyone to pay for their services. I was hoping that my article would simply provide helpful information to anyone who was curious about the review site since there are many people who use Yelp to decide whether or not to visit a store.
Sounded good at the time. How does one know what to believe these days? During that period of time I was getting consistent 4star and 5star and occasionally a 3star reviews left and right. I started panicking, blaming my staff, my managers, etc. I was so disappointed on myself. Then I started analyzing. I responded to every single one of the negative reviews. Offered these people free meals, etc. But it was like poking at a dead animal…. How come those particular people have a Yelp account but no FB or such???
On the other side, I will say that people read and see yelp. I wish there was an alternative….. No other way to say it. Now I just want my business removed from Yelp. As a small business consultant I have heard the best and worst of Yelp.
Do your due diligence before signing on the dotted line and research other marketing options. Totally agree with Joe and Scott. Yelp seems to enjoy posting only the negative reviews. But no, they wanna play judge over business owners. Fine then. If a Yelp visitor chooses to dig deep and read them, they can. Why is the review above written by a user with 52 friends and 5 reviews filtered out, while the one below makes the cut? I decided to try and find out. There is a key limiting factor in any analysis of visible versus filtered reviews—you cannot look at the user profile of someone whose review is not recommended.
If we knew exactly how it worked, then we could game it. A good way to get around this is to send a follow-up email to the customer a few days after you assist them, asking them how their experience was, and to leave a review for you if their experience was positive. If you hold a day-long promotion during which you offer customers some sort of deal if they leave a positive review for your business on Yelp, what Yelp is going to see is that a business which had previously received only a handful of reviews over several years is suddenly getting multiple reviews on the same day.
If you insist on having some sort of promotion, spread it out over time. Make it part of your standard follow-up communication, as suggested above, rather than some sort of special event that immediately puts Yelp on high alert.
But based on experienced, we can infer that the above is true. I opted to choose five random businesses in the local Sacramento area: a restaurant, auto repair shop, plumber, clothing shop, and golf course. I would collect this data for each and every visible and filtered review for these five businesses, and see if the comparisons made anything clear.
Now, there is a complicating factor for any comparison of Yelp reviews. In a phrase: power users. While many Yelp users are very low-key, only leaving a small handful of reviews, instead primarily using the service to view reviews left by other users.
But there is a small a coalition of super users who contribute a LOT of reviews to Yelp. For instance, one business I looked at had 33 reviews.
When I took a look at how many photos each user had previous submitted to Yelp, I found that while most users had contributed zero or very few photos, one user had submitted 9, photos to Yelp. This presents a serious problem. They completely wreck the grading curve. With this in mind, for all other variables besides Yelp rating, I chose to use the median average. For our purposes, a median is really useful because it gives us a number where half the users in a group fell below that number, and half of the users are above it.
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