How can yelp help your business

The fastest way to start getting reviews is by asking existing customers, family, friends, and staff to leave a Yelp review on your business profile. If you struggle to get the volume of positive reviews you are looking for, try offering an incentive for customers to leave a review. An incentive can be applied to nearly any of the methods above.

For example, you could offer a coupon via email to those who leave a review. Consider which offer will be most attractive to your customers and which method will best reach them in order to effectively incentivize customers to leave reviews. Yelp profiles are not a set-it-and-forget it-type of account.

After building out your profile and using strategies to get reviews, start monitoring your account. Check your account daily for new reviews—good and bad—and reply to them right away. Look through your list of reviews and find the good reviews. Show your appreciation for good reviews by thanking the reviewer for their feedback. This can be done with a short reply, but be sure to vary your replies to avoid your response looking canned or automated. As a general rule of thumb, start by apologizing for the experience or issue that the reviewer had, invite the reviewer to contact you directly to come to a resolution, and be sure not to get defensive.

Your profile includes a user dashboard that provides data on those who visit your profile. Review and analyze these available metrics to gain insight into when users are the most active, if there is a common thread in what they are saying, or if they are posting certain types of photos.

For example, a restaurant might find that people are visiting its profile on weekdays before dinner. This could be a good indicator of when to run future marketing campaigns. Example of the Yelp dashboard Source: LinkedIn. Yelp offers businesses the option to upgrade their profiles using enhanced, premium page features and Yelp Deals. The enhanced features include the addition of a call to action button, the inclusions of an enhanced photo gallery, and the removal of profile ads.

Additionally, Yelp Deals allows you to offer exclusive deals on your profile, such as a discount or gift certificates, to monetize your account. Enhanced business page features include the ability to add a call to action button, remove competitor ads from your profile page, and use an enhanced image gallery. A call to action CTA button is a button on your page that gives visitors a way to interact with your business by performing a certain action.

Example of a call to action button on a Yelp business page. To keep the focus on your business, you can choose to remove competitor ads from your page. The enhanced photo gallery option allows businesses to select the order that their photos display in their photo gallery. This gives businesses the ability to control what visitors see when they visit their page.

For example, a business may use this feature to showcase the professional photos they uploaded first. Otherwise, their photos may display after user-submitted photos, which may be low-quality and unflattering. Example of a Yelp business page with an enhanced photo gallery.

Yelp Deals are prepaid vouchers and gift certificates businesses use to monetize their profiles. Learn more about Yelp Deals. Example of a Yelp business page offering gift certificates.

Yelp advertising allows businesses to increase profile traffic, thereby attracting new customers. It achieves this through pay-per-click PPC ads that position your profile at the top of search results. For more information, contact a Yelp Ad specialist at Example of sponsored pages in Yelp search results.

Businesses tend to have a love-hate relationship with Yelp. While some love the free exposure and social proof it provides, others dislike how much bad reviews can impact them and that Yelp Ads are costly. Yelp for business has some very strong pros.

These can make it a very affordable and effective way to market your business. The cons of Yelp for business are light compared to its pros.

The top cons include the impact of negative reviews, the time it takes to manage another platform, and the cost to advertise on Yelp. The cons, such as bad reviews, can even serve as an opportunity to get customer feedback that can be used for making business improvements. Most importantly for small businesses, Yelp can be used for free as a way to draw in new customers.

For Yelp to be an effective marketing tool for your business, you need to manage it strategically. To learn more, browse the articles below, or check out our video of simple tips for creating a great Yelp Business Page. Yelp offers some features and tips for promoting your business, gaining exposure, and communicating with customers. If you want to learn more about managing your business with Yelp, check out our Guide to Success. Need to respond to a review of your business?

Click below for some best practices for both private and public responses, or watch our short video on how real business owners respond to reviews. Browse the articles below to learn about Yelp Ads, ad delivery, and how to change or cancel your advertising campaign.

You can also watch our video about the various ad programs we offer, or call to get started today. Learn about the different metrics in your business owner's account and how you can use that information to help determine the success of your advertising. Learn the details of setting up, redeeming, and getting paid for your Yelp Deals and Gift Certificates below.

You can also watch our video to learn more. Get started with Yelp Reservations — set up floor plans and rooms, create sheets for the different shifts throughout the week, schedule the sheets for your staff, and then get the reservation widget enabled on your websites.

Learn how to troubleshoot any technical issues you may be having on the Yelp Reservations website or app, and take advantage of the various metrics and reports you can run on your business. Handle the administrative details of Yelp Reservations — set notifications for your guests and your staff, edit or add billing information, and set up additional Yelp Reservation user logins. Take reservations, seat walk-ins, use the waitlist, and generally improve the flow of your business with all the other features that Yelp Reservations offers — save guest info, add notes, update table statuses or add timers, specify combined or blocked tables, and more.

Learn how to adapt your Reservation system to fit the needs of your restaurant and regional guidelines during the evolving COVID pandemic, as well as discover resources for diner safety features including creating contactless menus. Learn more about setting up and updating your current Yelp Guest Manager account. Learn how to adapt your Yelp Guest Manager system to fit the needs of your restaurant and regional guidelines during the evolving COVID pandemic, as well as discover resources for diner safety features including creating contactless menus.

Learn what hardware can be used in conjunction with the Yelp WiFi platform as well as how to configure the supported hardware. Activate your account, create your location s , build your splash page, configure your campaigns, and more. Everything you need to know about Yelp WiFi and how to optimize your experience with the platform.

No matter the tone a customer takes, you need to stay positive! This is an amazing opportunity to represent how your business approaches customer service.

Finding a cadence to respond to reviews is up to you. Obsessively checking Yelp every day may not be good for your psyche or worth your time depending on the size of your business.

We recommend taking the time once a week to read and respond to reviews in batch, so that you can respond to feedback quickly. Reviewers who are more active on the platform more posts, more friends are less likely to get caught in that section.

If you have a bunch of 5 or 4 star reviews from new Yelp reviewers, you can reach out to thank them for their business and explain that if they review a couple more businesses or add friends, their review will show up on your page.

The answer is no—positive reviews should be an organic outcome of they way you engage with your customers. We recommend against soliciting reviews, and Yelp explicitly prohibits offering anything to customers in exchange for a review.

They should feel natural, and you never want to come off as pushy towards your customers. You should make it easy for satisfied customers to find your Yelp page and leave you a review.

Yelp provides badges for your website and decals for your windows , and you should make sure your social media profiles and customer communications include links to Yelp. We think you can get a lot out of the Yelp platform by solely investing your time on the free page features offered.

For businesses in competitive areas, it may be worthwhile to test advertising to see if it can help drive traffic.