How To Optimize Business On Yelp
Any savvy business owner knows that online location management has become more challenging and complicated than ever before, but no less important for your business’s visibility and reputation.
More and more customers now say that they trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations, and many actively look for reviews to read before choosing who to give their business to. This means that review sites outside of social media are now significant for building trust in your brand.
Yelp has become one of the biggest and most popular online review channels that brands now need to pay attention to improve and enhance their online presence. To stand out online for the right reasons, drive more business, and improve your brand’s visibility and presence online, you need to take action and enhance your brand presence on Yelp.
Contents
Claim and Control Your Locations
One of the most important ways to make your brand’s locations look reputable and uniform on search results is to make sure you claim those locations on major platforms like Yelp.
Find any profiles for your locations, and make sure they all have clean and consistent location information to establish branded properties as a single source of accurate information. Doing this also tells search engines like Google that your brand has location data ready and available for searchers.
In the past, the challenge for brands who include Yelp or other review channels claiming in their brand strategy is the lack of seamless claiming. Processes like claiming by phone can skew location managers off and can start an ongoing issue with a lack of consistency and uniformity across a brand’s locations.
Because of this, it’s now more important than ever to make sure you claim all your brand’s locations and have one person controlling them to make sure everything is uniform. If you claim your profiles, you can also remove yelp reviews that are false or unfair.
How to Optimize Business on Yelp: Respond To Reviews
Customers are more likely to trust a local business if it has reviews. As customers become more willing to share their thoughts about the brands they trust and like to use, being a brand that is popular with customers should be one of your top priorities. Local engagement through responding to reviews is an effective way to connect with customers nearby, but marketers often underutilize.
After verifying your Yelp location page, ensure that your reviews are accounted for and responded to develop a positive view of your brand for all your locations. Whether the reviews you get are positive, negative, or neutral, make sure you engage with them.
Analyze, Analyze, Analyze
After verifying Yelp pages and integrating a review response strategy into the way you manage your reputation, the next important thing to optimize your online presence is ongoing tracking and analysis of your reviews.
On Yelp, this can be a challenge due to the number of locations across the region, country, or world. However, with a strong analytics platform in place, you can balance strategic input by corporate managers and engagement by location managers.
