Posted by: Dave Clarke
in My Blog on Jan 05, 2012
As a small business owner, there’s a good chance you might have heard about a website called Yelp.
At its most basic level, Yelp is a social networking site that features listings of businesses and services from all over the US and Canada (and a number of other countries). These listings feature user-submitted reviews as well as useful information about the business including address, hours, pictures, contact information, etc. Think of Yelp as an interactive YellowPages where it’s not just your business, but also your customers, that control what information is presented.
And to give you a sense of how big it is, over 61 million people from over 13 countries visit Yelp each month.
So what does that mean to you and your business? To help you navigate Yelp, we’ve put together a basic overview that will answer some of the high-level questions and hopefully give you a sense as to whether or not Yelp is relevant to your business. And if it is, we’ll get you started on the right foot.
Splitting Things Up
In the case of Yelp, there are two audiences:
- Users
- Businesses and services
Let’s start by understanding users (aka, anybody). First, Yelp is free for users to join. When a user first signs up, he or she creates a profile much like they do with Facebook. Then they write reviews of places, businesses, or services they’ve been to or experienced (i.e., a restaurant, a doctor’s office, a print shop, an HVAC service... literally anything). The user searches for the business or service they want to review by entering the name and location. To see this in action, let’s search “Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Q” in or near “Chantilly, VA” as an example.
Here’s the result: http://www.yelp.com/biz/famous-daves-chantilly
In addition to basic business information, you’ll see nearly 40 user-submitted reviews of Famous Dave’s here in Chantilly, near Clarke-Hook’s offices. Just look at how detailed and descriptive these reviews are! And what’s even more impressive is that most reviewers are not incentivized to review! (We say “most” because Yelp does “reward” power users with “Elite” status which provides them with invites to VIP events, discounts, coupons, etc. But “Elite” Yelpers are by no means the majority.)
If you were the franchise manager of this specific Famous Dave’s, you’d want to know what’s being said on your Yelp page, right? And you’d certainly want to figure out how you can take advantage of it not only to drive more customers, but also to provide them with a better experience based on what is virtually free customer feedback.
That brings us to the other Yelp audience: businesses and services (aka, you). If you were to search for your business on Yelp.com, there’s a good chance something will come up. It may be a page with just your basic business information that Yelp has gathered from third party sources and public records. There may also be some user-submitted reviews on your business’ Yelp page. (If there are reviews, that will let you know that your existing customers are active on Yelp.)
The most important opportunity for business owners when it comes to Yelp is their ability to “Claim This Business.” When you find your business’ page for the first time on Yelp, the site will ask you if it’s your business. The site will instruct you to “claim your business page and access your free Yelp for Business Owners account.” Regardless of whether or not there are any reviews on your business’ Yelp page, we recommend claiming it so that, if for nothing else, you can make sure the correct business information is presented. If you searched for your business on Yelp and nothing came up, you'll be walked through the process once you've set up a Business Owners account.
So why claim your page? Won’t this be just another “internet thing” you’ll have to worry about? There’s got to be a catch somewhere, right?
Well, there are a few reasons why we recommend claiming your Yelp page. First, if you have a website for your business, it is no longer the sole source for people seeking information about your business. Sure, it’s the one you control the most, but there are numerous other ways customers can learn about your business via the web - and when it comes to posting and reading reviews of merchants, many people use Yelp. Plus, once you claim your business page on Yelp, you can monitor how many people view your business page, update and control all the business information (which might not be totally accurate based on information Yelp has gathered!), privately or publicly send messages to customers, receive email alerts when a new review is posted, and - best of all - you can engage personally with your customers.
If you need more instruction on setting up your business page on Yelp, visit Yelp’s Business Owners Support Center.
Also, if you find your company Yelp page contains unfavorable reviews, we can provide some tips and tactics to help you manage your Yelp presence and image. Just contact Dave at his email listed below.
The last thing we’ll cover here about Yelp is how they make money. They make their money by enticing businesses to advertise on Yelp. “Businesses may advertise with Yelp for preferred search result placement and extra listing features. For the advertising fee, the business may include an individualized message, video and photo slide show onto the web page for its listing as well as receive reports on listing traffic.” (source) For now though, we recommend just dipping your toe in and familiarizing yourself with Yelp’s free elements.
Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself when it comes to Yelp and your business:
- Do my customers use Yelp? Ask them! And search for your competitors on Yelp to see if they have business pages (and customer reviews). If they do, it’s time to claim your Yelp page too.
- Does my business currently have a Yelp presence? Simply search your business name and location on Yelp.com and you’ll find out.
- If my business is listed on Yelp, are there any reviews written by users/customers? If so, this is a sign that you might want to “Claim Your Business Page.” If not, it still makes sense to claim the page because you should control as much as you can of any web presence about your business.
- Once I’ve claimed my Yelp page, is all of the business information correct? If not, simply edit the business information.
- Where can I go for help? Check out Yelp’s supremely helpful “Support Center.” It’s full of easy-to-understand videos, tutorials and content. And as always, we’re here to answer any of your questions.
This article is presented by Dave Clarke, one of our business resource experts. Dave is the founder of AuthenticMatters, a strategic digital communications consultancy that helps businesses - from seed-stage startups to mid-sized companies - better tell their stories and ultimately, attract the right customer for the right reasons, the right way. He is not the Chairman of Clarke-Hook with whom he shares a name (and perhaps numerous personality traits).
Dave specializes in web marketing, content and social media strategies, customer engagement and media relations. Prior to founding AuthenticMatters, he’s worked on a number of interesting projects including Thrive (a personal finance management site acquired by LendingTree), Churnless (a behavioral web consultancy) and GetRaised (a web service designed to help people get raises at work). For more, follow Dave on Twitter or email him.
