Yelp has become huge phenomenon in many parts of the US in helping consumers decide which restaurants to frequent and which services to try. Here’s a post from the Yelp Official Blog that has some nice tips on how small business owners can leverage the tools Yelp has provided to small business owners.
At the bottom of the post is a video interview with an owner of a fairly new Philly Cheese Steak restaurant in San Francisco. Within 1 year the new Phat Philly has received over 300 reviews. The owner also talks about how he uses Yelp to communicate with his reviewers and how he turns many of his reviewers that have given him a bad review into long term customers.
Here are the 4 Steps that are outlined for Business Owners to Leverage Yelp:
1. Unlock Your Free Business Page
Go to https://biz.yelp.com and claim your business.
There’s a video for new users on how to use Yelp for Business Owners as well.
2. Post Sales and Special Offers
This can be extremely powerful as mobile search becomes main stream. The other day Don and I were looking for a place to eat in San Francisco. Don took out his iPhone and next thing you know FourSquare is telling us what restaurants are providing specials based on our location using the iPhone gps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yelp mobile app started
providing this feature in the near future as well.
3. Respond to Reviews.
After you claim your business, as the business owner, you can login to your account and respond to your reviewers both publicly and privately.
4. Focus on Great Customer Service
We couldn’t agree more. Great customer service is the engine that drive great reviews.
Randy Hew is publisher myReviewsPage and business partner Expand2web, a Local SEO consulting firm. Randy also implements all local SEO strategies for his wife’s business, North Valley Optometry.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
nice post. thanks.
As always, you have provided clear step-by-step instructions that are enormously helpful to small business owners looking for ways they can ramp up their internet presence. Thank you for taking the time to write and post another great article that shows how small business owners can leverage the internet to their advantage.
Great video – I plan to integrate Yelp into my marketing campaign. Thanks for posting this vid.