Yelp. What is it? In the small business world Yelp is a popular and growing local business search option, and the sound of people yelping is a very good thing indeed.
First of all, Yelp.com was started in San Francisco in 2004 as a means to share user reviews on the cities’ many gathering spots. “Yelpers,” as users of the service are known, immediately began turning to the online platform to read and post reviews of restaurants, coffee shops, nightclubs, hair salons, and other establishments. Now, Yelp reviews cover major cities across the US, and Yelp.com receives millions of visits per month. If your business has a street address and provides a service of any kind, start out by checking to see if anyone has “yelped” about your business yet. Just go to Yelp.com and enter your business name and location into the search bar.
If one or more reviews exist, a snippet of the review will be displayed along with a Google map and flag pointing to the location of the business. Clicking on the business name brings up more user-generated content along with the street address, phone number and website. For a restaurant, Yelp would display such info as price range, if groups are welcome, parking restrictions, formal or casual attire, if the restaurant has table service or delivery, or if it is a good place to take kids.
As you might imagine, with user-generated content there is definitely a potential for a review to display inaccurate information. If you find something that needs to be corrected, for instance your hours are wrong, click on the little link under the review that says, ‘edit this business listing.’ Correct the information, and if it’s your business, you can check the box marked “Are you the business owner?”
Once you’ve got some reviews, Yelp offers a few ways to promote them. You can add a badge to your website that tells how many Yelp reviews you’ve received and links to them. Yelp’s sponsorship program lets you enhance your business’ profile with larger photo in a slide show format, an announcement section, and a featured review for that one positively glowing, couldn’t be happier customer review you want everyone to read. You can also pay for a sponsored advertisement to run on search results pages when people may be searching for your competition.
There’s also a nifty feature called “Browse Nearby…” this link is ideal for people not familiar with the area to locate a popular restaurant, then find other coffee bars, shopping, night life, religious organizations, professional services, or hotels nearby. Suppose your business is around the corner from a popular pizzeria. I would want to be in the Yelp system if I were you!
If you search Yelp and find you are not in the system, on the bottom of the search result page you’ll see a big red button titled ‘Add Business’ which leads to a form where you can do just that. I created a listing for MightyMerchant…First I needed to create a Yelp account for myself, then I went back to that big red ‘Add Business’ button and it took just 5 minutes.
Yelpers across the country use the service with a fervor unmatched on any other review site. The great thing about is that it’s free, and millions of people really do rely on it to find the best services as recommended by real people. So what are you going to yelp about?
Posted on December 26th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Search
Good overview of Yelp. Our team is working on an alternative to Yelp and other local directories called Yokld.com. The primary differentiator on Yokld is the ability for businesses to be voted for and ranked with a Digg-like format. With many of the features detailed above that Yelp offers Yokld additionally differentiates the local business information so that users can quickly and easily know which are the “Best”.