Yelp for a small business: what is worth doing.

Should you bother? A quick test

Whether Yelp is worth anything depends on whether your customers use it, and that varies by trade and by town. Find out before you spend time or money on it:

• Search Yelp for your trade and your town, the way a customer would.
• Look at the top five businesses: how many reviews they have, and how recent the newest ones are.
• Look for your own business. Yelp may already have a page for you, with reviews you have never seen.
• For a month, ask every new customer how they found you, and count the ones who say Yelp.

If competitors' newest Yelp reviews are years old, your customers are not choosing on Yelp, and a claimed free page is all you need. If a busy competitor gets a steady stream of recent ones, Yelp is part of how people near you decide, and it is worth doing properly.

Yelp's own annual report describes its reach in terms of the United States and Canada. For a business in Europe, run the same test, and in most cases put the time into your Google profile first.

Claim the free page

Claiming a Yelp page is free. Yelp says a claimed page does not make you an advertiser, although you have to claim it before you can advertise. You claim it through Yelp for Business by finding your business and verifying that you own or represent it. Once it is claimed, you can:

• Correct the name, address, phone number, website and opening hours, including special hours for holidays.
• Reply to reviews, publicly or by private message.
• Answer messages and quote requests from customers.
• Add photos, your history and your specialties.
• See page visits, leads and other customer activity.

Yelp says a claimed page can go back to showing as unclaimed if the owner stops logging in. Log in at least once a month, which you will do anyway to check messages.

What to put on the page

Treat the page like your Google profile: the same facts, kept the same. A customer who sees one set of hours on Yelp and another on Google trusts neither.

• The name on your sign, and the same phone number and address as on Google and your website. If customers do not visit you, check how Yelp shows your service area.
• Hours, and holiday hours set before each holiday.
• The right categories, so the page appears in searches for your trade.
• Real photos of the premises, the team and finished work. Yelp says its users are very visual.
• The From the Business Owner section, written plainly: who you are, what you do best and the areas you cover.
• A link to the page on your website for your main service, with a tag on the link so your analytics can count visits from Yelp.

Check the map pin as well. A pin on the wrong street sends people to the wrong door.

Do not ask for Yelp reviews

This is where Yelp differs from Google. Google encourages you to ask every customer and gives you a link to do it. Yelp says the opposite: proactively asking for reviews may hurt your Yelp rating, because its software may not recommend reviews that seem to be prompted by the business. Its rules cover more than the obvious:

• Do not ask anyone for a review: customers, mailing list subscribers, friends or family.
• Do not ask for one straight after a survey or a contact form.
• Do not have staff compete to collect reviews.
• Do not offer freebies, discounts or payment for a review, or for removing one.

What Yelp does want is for customers to know you are on Yelp. Show its branding, request its free signage, display a People Love Us On Yelp sticker if you have earned one, and link to your Yelp page from your website. In Yelp's own words, tell customers to find you on Yelp, but do not ask them for a review.

If you send Google review requests automatically, keep Yelp out of them. A Yelp link in the same message is exactly the kind of asking Yelp's software tries to spot.

Ask for Google reviews the way how to get more Google reviews describes, and let Yelp reviews arrive on their own.

What not recommended means

Yelp's recommendation software decides which reviews appear in the main list on your page. The rest sit in a not recommended section, reached through a link at the bottom of the page, and they do not count towards your star rating or your review count.

Owners take this personally. Yelp's explanation is less dramatic:

• A review can be not recommended simply because the software does not know enough about the reviewer.
• Reviews move between the two sections over time as the software runs again.
• Yelp says advertisers and non-advertisers are treated exactly the same, and that no employee can override the software.

So a loyal customer's warm review can end up in the not recommended section, and Yelp says nobody there can move it by hand. Do not ask the customer to post it again. Reply to it if you like, and carry on.

Consumer Alerts, and how to avoid one

Yelp puts a Consumer Alert over the reviews on a business page when it finds activity meant to mislead. The ones a small business can bring on itself:

• Compensated activity: evidence that someone offered cash or another reward for reviews. US only.
• Suspicious review activity: for example, large numbers of reviews from one IP address, or reviewers linked to a group trading fake reviews.
• Questionable legal threats: evidence that a business is using the legal system to intimidate or silence a reviewer. US only.
• Unusual activity: a spike in reviews after a business becomes the subject of media attention. Yelp temporarily stops new posts while this one is up, in the US and Canada.

The IP address point matters for anyone who lets customers post on a shop tablet or over the shop Wi-Fi. On Yelp that is a real risk, so customers who post should do it from their own phones. And never threaten a reviewer: that brings its own alert, in front of every reader.

Answer reviews on Yelp

Owners of a claimed page can reply with a public comment, which everyone sees, or a direct message, which only the reviewer sees. Yelp suggests starting with a public comment that answers the review itself before sending a message. To reply at all, Yelp asks for an approved profile photo and an approved business account name.

Yelp's rules for owner comments are short: no personal attacks, no advertising, and no offering anything to change a review. The wording that works on Google works here too, and how to reply to Google reviews has examples by situation, including the trap for clinics and law firms.

If a review breaks Yelp's Content Guidelines, report it and include information Yelp's moderators can check for themselves. They email you their decision. Yelp says it does not remove a critical review unless it clearly breaks its guidelines, so reporting one is no promise that it will go.

Yelp ads: judge them by enquiries

Yelp's ads are pay per click. You set a monthly budget, Yelp says it will never charge you more than that budget, and the price of each click moves with supply and demand: how many businesses want the same clicks, how much ad space there is and how many people are searching. Spending is uneven through the month, so a quiet first fortnight does not mean the budget will go unspent.

Views and clicks are Yelp's numbers. Yours is enquiries that turn into jobs. Before you start:

• Ask Yelp in writing what counts as a click you pay for, how long any commitment lasts and how you stop.
• Decide the test: one or two months, a budget you can afford to lose, and the cost per job at which you would carry on.
• Make Yelp enquiries countable: messages and quote requests through Yelp, calls where the customer says how they found you, and the tagged link from your Yelp page to your website.
• Record every Yelp enquiry, and what happened to it, in the same place as your other enquiries.

At the end of the test, divide what you spent by the jobs you won from Yelp, and compare that with your other sources. If you cannot tell which jobs came from Yelp, the test has not worked yet, whatever the dashboard says.

Yelp also sells an upgrade package with premium page features. Judge it the same way: what will it change that a customer would notice, and how will you know?

Request a Quote: answer it fast

Yelp lists Request a Quote among its free tools. A customer describes a job and waits for replies, and the firm that answers first with a sensible question and a time to visit has the best chance of the work.

Send Yelp messages to the same phone and inbox as your other enquiries, with notifications on, so a request at 7pm does not wait until someone logs in on Monday. Enquiry follow-up shows how to route every enquiry, wherever it came from, and chase the ones nobody answered.

A first reply to adapt, for a home services business: "Hi Dana, thanks for the details. I can look at the leaking tap tomorrow between 8 and 10 or Thursday after 3. Is it the kitchen or the bathroom, and is the water still running?"

One garage, start to finish

A two-bay car repair garage in a US city runs the test from the top of this guide. The three busiest garages nearby all have Yelp reviews from the last few weeks, so Yelp matters there. Here is what the owner does next:

• Claims the page Yelp had already made for the garage, which turns out to have eleven reviews, two of them not recommended.
• Fixes the hours, which were two years out of date, sets the holiday hours and adds photos of the bays and the team.
• Replies publicly to the reviews from the last year, including a fair complaint about a car kept a day longer than promised.
• Turns on notifications, so quote requests reach the service desk phone.
• Runs Yelp ads for two months with a fixed budget, and logs every enquiry that mentions Yelp.

At the end, the owner divides the spend by the jobs that came from Yelp and compares it with what a job from Google costs. If Yelp is close, the ads stay. If it is far behind, the ads stop and the free page stays, because it costs nothing to keep right.

Yelp reviews on your own website

Yelp encourages businesses to embed their favourite Yelp reviews on their website, share them on social media and link back to the Yelp page. It is the one place where Yelp wants you to push its reviews. Show them with the reviewer's name as it appears on Yelp and a link to the page, so visitors can read the rest.

The rules for showing reviews as testimonials, from permission to trimming a quote, are in testimonials on your website.

A routine that takes little time

• Turn on notifications for messages and quote requests, and answer them the same day.
• Log in once a month: check the details, add a photo or two and reply to new reviews.
• Before each holiday, set the special hours.
• Whenever anything changes, change it on Yelp, Google and your website on the same day.
• Never ask for a Yelp review, and tell your staff why.

That is all most businesses need. Put the rest of the effort into Google, where asking is allowed. Our websites come with the Google Business Profile set up or tidied, as the prices page lists.