As a business owner or a Local SEO professional serving clients in the USA, Yelp is one tool to consider using to help your business gain visibility and garner reviews.
Why only USA?
According to Google Trends, Yelp for business is not used by businesses in the UK, Australia or New Zealand. In the US, California leads with the most regional users.
Which Businesses Should Be on Yelp?:
Retail - Yes: Surprisingly, restaurants are not Yelp’s biggest review category. Retail stores lead the pack.
Restaurants - Absolutely!: Perhaps not number one, a very close second to retail. Many people use Yelp to search for a great restaurant, bar or taco shop.
Attorneys, Doctors and Real Estate Professionals - Evaluate:
It’s challenging for these types of businesses to get recommended reviews to surface in Yelp. On the reviewer side, many people don’t want the world to know about attorney and physician visits and won’t leave reviews. On the business side, professional ethics and the confidential nature of the business limit the response to reviews. Real Estate professionals may sell 12-15 homes in a year, not a large amount of reviews to surface.
Finding and Claiming Your Yelp Business Page:
The most common mistake business owners make when setting up their page is setting up a personal profile. Take care to set your business profile up as a “Business Owner” not as a Yelp reviewer.
Yelp uses phone verification for your business page. Best to set it up when the owner is available to call and verify. Include business information: hours, address, about and pictures of you, your team and location.
Business Tools
Yelp has a plethora of free and paid business tools. Two are outstanding, simple and easy to put in place.
Yelp Reservations: Keep those tables full! By using this super (FREE) tool, any restaurant or nightclub is able to accept online reservations from their website and their Yelp page.
Check In Offers: Hidden in “Manage Your Business with Yelp”, one of the best (FREE) tools Yelp offers. As a business owner you can run Groupon like ads in Yelp. For example: A restaurant can run a Happy Hour check-in special for a few hours.
What to Do With Reviews: Engage with both good and bad reviews.
Respond as the owner or representative of the owner. Make certain your profile has a nice picture and tells a bit about you.
Bad Reviews: Take care of unhappy customers.
As a first step, use the private message feature to connect individually. Take time to get to know your customer and understand what happened.
Offer a discount or replacement meal, whatever is customary when a customer complains in person. Often a bit of kindness will soften the blow and the reviewer may change the review to a more favorable one.
If unable to resolve with your customer, respond politely and non-defensively to the review publicly. This lets others see that you are a concerned business owner and are willing to address negative situations.
Good Reviews: Thank the customer publicly for leaving a nice review.
Privately invite them to your next event or offer them a coupon or treat. Next time they visit, take the time to say hi! Consider having a special event to honor your top customers.
Keep attention focused on the happy customers.
Oftentimes, there is a tendency to obsess over the few bad reviews. In turn, the attention to happy customers slips.
More than likely, 80% of reviews on Yelp are 3-5 stars.
By focusing on keeping happy customers happy, they will remember and mention their experienc to their ‘real life’ friends in day to day interactions.
Less than 80% good reviews for your business? Take time to understand and correct the problem.
Why Would A Yelp Review Not Get Recommended?
Yelp’s recommendation software is automated. A few reason a Yelp review may not make it to the recommended list:
- Multiple reviews for one place originating from the same computer
- Reviews from a less established user
- A seemingly unhelpful commentary
- Reviews that appear to be from a friend of the business owner
There are no Yelp representatives available to help change reviews.
Yelp explains the automated review system in this video: https://youtu.be/PniMEnM89iY
At the end of the day, it comes back to providing excellent customer service, regardless of which platform you are using. Choose Yelp as a tool if appropriate for your business and implement along with other tools such as Twitter and Google Reviews.
The post Quick Guide to using ‘Yelp for Business’ appeared first on Plus Your Business.
from Plus Your Business http://ift.tt/1LHMf18
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment