In this week’s video, I share the reason why it’s a bad idea to ignore Yelp. Sure, we all hate the site, but there’s a very important reason that you need to invest a little bit of reputation management time – watch to see why!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays! This week, I’m talking about everyone’s favorite review site… Yelp

We have a special returning guest this week, my kiddo Max. He’s in the school band this year, and he’s playing the trombone, so he’s gonna assist with this week’s video… You’ll see how in just a second.

I’m pretty sure we all agree – Yelp sucks. Most businesses and even most marketing agencies pretty much ignore Yelp, but I’m here today to tell you why you need to pay attention. And the reason is this:

If a potential customer looks up directions on an iPhone and uses Apple Maps, the stars that show on Apple Maps come from Yelp, not from Google.

If you’re not paying attention to Yelp, you could end up with a really bad review score. What happens if you’re someone like this, with a good score on Google and lots of reviews… but then a potential customer looks up directions on Apple Maps and sees that you only have a star and a half. How many people will decide not to do business with you if that happens?

Yelp’s difficult for all the reasons we’re all familiar with, but most importantly, it is super aggressive in filtering out reviews. It only counts reviews from people it considers to be “Yelp users”, so typically a bunch of positive reviews get lost in limbo.

Now, I’m not telling you to go out and start pushing for Yelp reviews. In fact, that’s a bad idea because any reviews non-Yelp-users won’t show up anyway. But you do want to pay attention and make sure that you’ve got at least a 3.5 or 4 rating on Yelp so you don’t scare away potential customers.

This bit totally cracks me up. Let’s do it one more time… Yelp!

That’s all the time we’ve got for today, 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 we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.