Learn Yelp to Grow Your Business

Majority of business owners consider Yelp as a place for customers to leave reviews for the services or goods they received.  The surface model of this is that good reviews turn on others looking for your line of work to your business.  Yelp will help you by attracting potential customers who are looking companies with a strong quality rating.  There is more to this than meets the eye. What most business owners don’t know is that search engine bots also read through your business Yelp reviews and use them to determine if you are a good business to display on top of an organic search result when someone is looking for your line of service.

It’s no longer enough to claim on your own site that you are “best in…” or “award winning”.  Too many site owners post this type of inflated information diluting the overall message.  Search engines now look elsewhere to see if a business truly is as good as it claims to be.  This is where outside sites with reviews come into place.  Google, Bing and others now read through reputable rating websites to try and verify that you do offer what you claim on your web site, and that you are a business that offers solid performance. A search engine will look through your Yelp reviews, find in your reviews any mentions of what services you performed, and how well you did. Yelp is just one of many sites they will review, but it’s one of the most important ones for America as it has a huge presence in the United States.

Boosting your organic position with Yelp

The first thing you need to do is to claim the business in the Yelp directory. Then make sure all general contact information is accurate.

Second, think about what services and areas you service and write up a general introduction to who you are and where you work.

Third, it goes without saying that you should do a heck of a job taking care of your customers and when your work is done, ask them to write a review in Yelp (as well as Google, Facebook, etc). Be sure to have them write what services you performed and where it was done.  This is a big boost in spelling out the little details.

Stay active with requesting your clients to give you a review and over time you will boost your organic position in search engines. When a search engine bot sees a steady trickle of 4 and 5 star reviews, as well as terms (keywords) of services you performed and what areas you serviced, they will slowly boost your organic ranking. Their job is to give the best results so that satisfied search engine users keep returning with confidence.

Be Active On review and Social Sites

Make it part of your business process to have ownership of your business information on Yelp, Facebook, Angie’s list (if appropriate), and other review directories that are known in your industry. Search engines will check up on your performance there and with good scores will push you up on their search results.  This isn’t a quick process but over time this will pay off. If you need help with any of this, feel free to reach out!

Lastly a big thank you to Juhasz Imre from Pexels for this solid photo.