Ultimate Guide For Yelp Reviews

If you are running an online business, then you know how important reviews are in growing your business.

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There are different review sites that can help you improve your services or products. In this article, we will talk about yelp reviews.

To start with you may be asking yourself. What is Yelp? Well, this is a review and rating site where clients can leave reviews about products and services local businesses offer.

Through the reviews clients give, they help potential clients make an informed decision on the kind of business services to use.

Businesses that can use yelp

Different local businesses use yelp for ratings and reviews to improve their services and generate new customers. These include:

1. Local retailers. Any brick-and-mortar business offering physical products.
2. Home services business. These include plumbers, electricians, movers, lawn care and contractors.
3. Beauty services. These include massage providers, salon and spa businesses.
4. Health and fitness. These include yoga studios, gyms, golf clubs businesses.
5. Auto services. they include car wash services, auto detailing, mechanics, parking brands.
6. Entertainment businesses. They include night clubs, theaters and comedy clubs.
7. Foodservice businesses. The likes of restaurants, hotels, and bakeries.

Now that you know some of the businesses that can use yelp, let’s look at how to use Yelp to grow your business.

How yelp works

Register your business page

To start, you have to create a business page on yelp 

But before you create an account, confirm to ensure you don’t have an already existing profile of your business. If you don’t have an existing account, go ahead and create one. 

If your profile exists, go ahead and claim it. Here is an example of a claimed business account.

Add business details

Your business profile page has just your basic details. You need to add more information about your business on the page you have created. These details include:

1. Website address
2. Working hours
3. Contact details
4. Your business category
5. Address of your physical location
6. Business names
7. Your business descriptions like the number of staff workers, the history of your business, information on your market specialty e.t.c
8. Your business profile photos
9. Cost of your products or services

Here is an example of Carl’s Jr. business profile on Yelp.

Now that you have a running yelp business account it’s now time to boost the way your business performs on the site.

How to boost your business performance on Yelp

Advertise on Yelp 

Yelp allows you to advertise your business brand to your customers. 

Through your business advertising, you can draw leads to your business, increase your brand awareness and make more sales. 

Ensure you use the paid options of yelp to get more advanced features that will help you advertise your business.

Update your yelp profile

Having a business account is a great opportunity to increase your business reach and draw more customers to your business. 

If your potential clients can’t find the latest information in relation to your business they will not convert.

Ensure you update your business information in your yelp account. Information like changes in prices, product innovations and offers are very essential to your business success and for your customer decision making process..

Respond to clients feedback and reviews

Ensure you address your clients feedback in a short time. You can ask your customers for feedback about your brand on yelp. 

You can ask for reviews from previous customers. Remember most potential clients read reviews before using business products or services.

Avoid fraudulent reviews on yelp as they can negatively hurt your business brand. You can use your network to get reviews of your business. Here are some examples.

Use your website. You can ask your visitors to leave a review on your Yelp profile with the help of Yelp badge. 

Social media. Use social sites to ask for reviews from your network. You can post to Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and include a link to your business profile on Yelp to make it easy for your network to leave a review.

Email campaigns. Send your contacts emails asking them to give you a review on your Yelp profile. You can also add an email signature with a link to your Yelp profile.

Post deals on your Yelp account

Clients love gifts and discounts on products or services. To boost your performance, offer deals on your Yelp account. 

It will attract more customers to your business and you can make more sales. Take a look at this example below.

Upgrade your business page

Yelp premium features provide more advantages to businesses as they can reach their clients in different ways.

Take advantage of the advanced features to build more trust, attract leads to your business and increase your sales. 

Include a CTA’s on your business page. Premium package gives an option to add call-to-action on your profile to direct your customers to take action when they land on your profile. 

Examples of these are book an appointment, place an order, or request a quote, etc.

Remove ads from competitors. For the free business page, yelp gives visitors alternatives to the business category that they can choose. 

This can affect your business as some visitors may be attracted to the competitor results that pops up with your business profile search.

With the premium package, you can remove other ads from your profile. Your visitors can only focus their attention on your profile and this increases engagement rate with your account.

Improve photo gallery

You have the power and control to plan how your photos appear on your profile. You can let your visitors seen your most advanced photos first to increase engagement. 

Responding to reviews on your Yelp profile

You will receive different reviews from clients. Both positive and negative. It is essential to handle these reviews in a professional way. 

This will help enhance your business growth and build more trust with potential customers.

Positive reviews

These reviews help you achieve your business goals faster which include

1. build trust and credibility
2. generate leads
3. improve your services and products
4. Build your brand loyalty
5. Increase brand awareness

Here are some tips to handle positive reviews

1. Read the whole review. Some clients can leave very long positive reviews on your Yelp business profile. Don’t be tempted to skip through to the end of the reviews. 

The clients may provide some constructive criticism within the reviews that can help you better serve them that’s why you need to read the whole review.

1. Write new responses to clients. Ensure you read and reply to the reviews with suitable reviews. Don’t copy-paste your responses to different reviews your users give on your Yelp profile.
2. Do more than just replying to the reviews. Ensure you deliver more than just reply to your Yelp reviews. Include some offers you can give your customers like discounts or a surprise that can keep building your business relationship.

How to respond to negative reviews

It can be heartbreaking to see negative reviews about your brand from your esteemed customers. Here are some ways you can deal with negative reviews.

1. Track your negative feedback. If you keep getting negative feedback, track and analyze what could be wrong. Then take action to ensure you fix whatever issues making clients give you negative reviews.
2. Apologize for the mistakes. If clients give negative reviews, its because something is wrong. Take responsibility and apologize to the customers. Assure your clients that the mistakes will not happen again, then take action to fix the mistakes.
3. Update clients of your progress. Let the client know your progress in solving the mistakes. Give the steps you used to solve the problem. Clients will feel appreciated and cared as this will build more trust from the clients.
4. Don’t argue with the clients. Don’t let your emotions control you and start bringing arguments. Be cool and professional to the client. Don’t take the reviews or clients comments personal. 
5. Send clients private messages. You can try to solve the issues with the customer in a private manner. 

You can have a one-on-one chat with clients and solve the issues with the client. Send them a message and try to solve the issues privately.

1. Take time before responding to the reviews. Avoid immediate response to negative reviews. Your anger and emotions can get in the way and instead of trying to solve the issue you make it even worse. 

How to measure yelp advertising success

Here are some metrics you can track to measure yelp business marketing success.

Yelp deals sold

You are advertising your business so you can generate more leads and convert them to clients for your business.

So the deals you sell through yelp are a clear signal of progress in marketing. More deals are clear proof your advertising is working well.

Clicks to your website

Potential buyers and reviewers who click on your yelp account and get attracted to your services or products will click on your website to learn more. 

You can use the clicks as a metric to measure the success of your business marketing.

Here is an example.

A potential client looking for movers on yelp find this company below

Clicks on the business website link (www.uplinemoving.com) and orders their company services. 

An increase in clicks and sales from your yelp profile to your business account is a sign that your yelp marketing strategies are succeeding.

Ensure you have a great landing page that is optimized for search engine ranking.

Clicks on your call to action buttons

You have included CTA buttons within your yelp profile. These CTA’s include order now and make your reservations. 

When clients click on the call-to-action it means they are ready to take action. Take a look at this example below.

For the above image, when a client clicks on “order online” They are ready to make a purchase from the restaurant.

They will be redirected to the restaurant website where they can make the purchase.

Yelp Bookmarks

Your clients could be willing to leave reviews on your website or learn more about your business but don’t have time so they just bookmark your pages.

When you analyze your yelp bookmarks you can know your marketing progress in your Yelp business profile. 

Clients who bookmark your pages can visit them later and take action such as living reviews or making purchases.

User messages to your business

When potential clients find your business attractive and want to engage with it they will communicate with you. 

They will leave messages that can further down and initiate conversations with them. The more messages from clients about your business services or products the higher the engagement rates.

You can use the messages to build trust with your leads and convert them to customers.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Yelp

The DO’S

1. Use yelp posters for your business. You can use yelp stickers, posters or any other materials to notify your clients that you are on Yelp. When clients visit your local business, they can visit your yelp business account and leave reviews for you.
2. You can host yelp events. This motivates your clients to visit your Yelp profile, engage with your business and leave reviews. Visit yelp.com/events.

Fill out the details of your event, then promote your event to clients who visit your business. 

You can contact the local yelp elite to help you with your event promotion since they have a lot of influence.

3. Add staff photos. You can let your yelp visitors know the people behind your brand. It helps build and strengthen trust with your visitors. 

Happy friendly faces give positive impressions to your visitors and encourage them to engage with your brand.

Don’ts

Ask for specifically positive reviews. When you reach out to your network or any other person for reviews, just be general.  

Let them decide the type of reviews to give you. Asking for positive reviews only violates the yelp review policy.

Pay people to give reviews. This can affect your business reputation on yelp. Let the customers give reviews according to their level of satisfaction with your product or services you have offered them.

Conclusion

Reviews are essential in increasing your user experience, earning trust with customers and making more sales.

Use the above tips on your Yelp business profile to help earn grow your brand awareness, generate leads for your local business and increase your sales.

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