In this week’s episode, I share the secret to recovering all those awesome reviews that are hidden in your Yelp profile. Yelp only counts reviews from what it considers to be “regular Yelp users” – so I share a tip that will help you get those reviews to show up and count towards your score!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite review site – Yelp (laugh track)
Yeah, I know – we all hate Yelp. Whenever I talk to business owners about Yelp, it always reminds me of what my mama used to say back when I was just a young sprout
And most people would agree with mama – Yelp is horrible.
Unfortunately, we can’t ignore Yelp. Obviously, it’ll show up in search results when someone is looking for your business, especially if they’re looking for reviews about your business. But most importantly, whenever someone searches for directions to your business on an iPhone, the review stars that show up on Apple Maps come from Yelp, not from Google.
You might have an awesome review score on Google, but if customers look up directions and see a 1 star rating, how many will decide not to come do business with you?
The biggest problem is that positive reviews get filtered out and don’t count in your aggregate review score.
The reason this happens is because Yelp prefers to show reviews from what it considers to be “Yelp users”. In other words, they only count reviews from people who use Yelp on a regular basis.
If you get an amazing 5 star review from a customer who’s never used Yelp before, and never uses it again, that review will get caught in the filter – and it won’t count towards your score.
So I’m going to share a little trick with you today that will help you get those reviews back.
Yelp doesn’t count the reviews because the people who wrote the reviews haven’t left any other reviews and have no friend connections in Yelp. If you can change that, boom – the reviews will magically pop out of the filter and start counting.
All you have to do is look the person up in your CRM and find their contact information. Shoot them an email that says something like
Hey, Jim Bob – thanks so much for the amazing review you left us on Yelp. Unfortunately, Yelp doesn’t count reviews that come from regular Yelp users – so your review is hidden. We’d greatly appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to leave a few reviews for other local businesses you like, and also make a few friend connections. That will pop your review out of the filter so everyone can see the great things you said about us
If someone took the time to leave an amazing review, they want the world to read it – and usually they’ll do what you ask.
When we do Yelp outreach campaigns like this, we usually see about a 20 to 30 percent return.
So, follow this little tactic, and you’ll recover some of your filtered reviews, which gives you a higher review count and higher aggregate score without actually getting any new reviews!
That’s all the time we’ve got for today’s video, so you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to come back next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
