Yelp is s a crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site. It can be a great way to promote your local business and let your previous customers brag about you.
However, they have “been accused of using unfair practices to raise revenue from the businesses that are reviewed on its site – e.g., by presenting more negative review information for companies that do not purchase its advertising services or by prominently featuring advertisements of the competitors of such non-paying companies or conversely by excluding negative reviews from companies’ overall rating on the basis that the reviews “are not currently recommended.” [8] There have also been complaints of aggressive and misleading tactics by some of its advertising sales representatives. The company’s review system’s reliability has also been affected by the submission of fake reviews by external users, such as false positive reviews submitted by a company to promote its own business or false negative reviews submitted about competing businesses – a practice sometimes known as ‘astroturfing’, which the company has tried to combat in various ways.” (Wikipedia)
One of the ways they have attempted to combat this is by using a secret algorithm that will hide certain reviews that appear to be dishonest or unhelpful. The problem with this is that quite a few authentic reviews appear to be inaccurately flagged and hidden by Yelp’s algorithm. For a much more in-depth analysis you can check out this article at Post Modern Marketing. Using that article and some personal experience I have created a list of ways that users may be able to decrease the likelihood of their reviews being hidden. Feel free to share these with your customers to help ensure your business is accurately portrayed on Yelp.
How to keep Yelp reviews visible.
It seems that the algorithm equates effort to authenticity. You’ll notice that all of the items below take a little bit of extra time, but encouraging your reviewers to do some of these may be the difference between their reviewing being visible or not.
- Upload a profile image to your profile
- Upload photos with your review
- Do more reviews
- Add friends on Yelp
- Post an in-depth (slightly longer) review
- Don’t go overboard with the positivity (think double exclamation points, lots of positive adjectives) as that can seem fake
Hopefully these tips will help your Yelp profile shine a little brighter. As always, feel free to contact us for your web design and photography needs. We loving working with business and individuals from Chico, Butte County, and all of northern California!
