For both business owners and SEOs alike, Yelp can be a sore spot during any conversation when trying to get customers through the door. So why should businesses use it, and why should SEOs encourage their clients to embrace it?
The History of Yelp
Yelp has been around for nearly a decade and has always prided itself as being a reliable and thorough business review and recommendation site. Because of their longstanding tradition of showing customers what’s good and what’s not, there will be a Yelp review about virtually any company in any industry. Yes, even that food truck that sits outside your office building every afternoon.
In a recent 2015 survey, 90% of those who use Yelp stated that positive reviews affect their purchases of both services and consumer goods, while 93% conduct at least some amount of research on Yelp about a company.
The Benefits of Yelp
First off, Yelp is a popular site — so why not use it’s free services? With 142 million active monthly Yelp visitors as of 2015, one can only conclude that the site will attract more in 2016; you’re going to want to get your company on the site to capture some of those numbers.
For SEOs, Yelp is a great tool to control what type of information is out there about your client’s company. Think of the site as a means of reputation management. Be sure to follow best practices however and always address negative reviews from customers and give a big “Thank You!” to positive reviews. Yelp reviews are great for promoting on other social media sites as well. Simply take a screen snippet of the review and post it on Facebook while tagging the customer who left the comment.
Both business owners and SEOs can benefit from gaining demographic information when utilizing Yelp. This is especially important for small businesses who may otherwise not have much information out there about their company in terms of where they are located and who their target audience is. Yelp can show where people are from, the age range of their customers, and more.
Yelp has integrated with other social media sites in order to improve online visibility. Now SEOs have the ability to embed a Yelp review button on their website to make it easier for users to leave reviews or do additional research about the company.
Plain and simple, the use of Yelp will net your business a higher annual revenue. According to statistics, those who utilize Yelp appropriately generally see an $8,000 increase in revenue every year on average.
Utilize Yelp to the Fullest
If you own a business, chances are the company will be up on Yelp. For SEOs who add their clients to other listing sites such as YellowPages, Yelp will also pull this information into their own database to generate a business page. No matter how Yelp creates the page, just be sure to claim it so that you can take full advantage of what the site has to offer. Claiming a page will allow you to respond to reviews as well as change important company information such as hours of operation and phone number.