Yelp reviews drive Yelp marketing. Yelp reviews make or break local businesses. Good Yelp marketing increases sales. Bad Yelp marketing decreases sales.
Yelp reviews are at the heart of every great Yelp marketing strategy. The key success factors for Yelp reviews are quality, quantity, and authenticity.
Check out “How Yelp Marketing Increases Sales” for a more strategic perspective on Yelp marketing and how the formula for success comes down to “better Yelp reviews,” “more Yelp reviews,” and “authentic Yelp reviews.”
How to get positive Yelp reviews
Get better Yelp reviews by getting better feedback
If your business is like most, your Yelp reviews will mostly be less than 5 stars. But your not-so-happy customers are just as important as your happiest 5-star customers. In fact, you can double or triple your 5-star reviews just by listening to feedback from customers who gave less than 5 stars. When customers won’t give a 5-star review, ask for feedback on how to earn their 5-star review in the future. Improve your business with the best customer ideas to make more customers happy. One good business improvement could generate countless 5-star reviews in the future.
Act on the right feedback only
Some customers will give you feedback requesting things you don’t want to do (or shouldn’t do). Most of the feedback you get will not be actionable. Look for ideas that could help lots of your customers, not just the one customer offering the idea. Also, customers are bad at knowing what they want, but good at knowing what they don’t want. Listen carefully to their complaints. Figure out the true underlying reason why they’re complaining. Then come up with your solutions to solve the problem in ways the customers never imagined.
Avoid implied commitments to feedback
If you ask customers for feedback in person, they may get the impression that you agree and will make the changes they suggest. If you don’t make those changes later on, they may get offended. Avoid this “implied false commitment” by using an online survey tool, email, or other “system” to collect feedback, instead of asking every customer for feedback in person. Of course, Rising Star Reviews does this for you, but if you don’t use Rising Star Reviews, there are plenty of online survey tools like SurveyMonkey that you can use.
Make every review count by unfiltering Yelp reviews
Yelp filters out many positive reviews unintentionally. Spammers try to post fake reviews to boost their businesses. So Yelp created a software algorithm to detect reviews it thinks are not “authentic.” However, the algorithm is sometimes inaccurate. Some positive reviews get filtered out by mistake. Check for this problem yourself. Just go to your Yelp business page and look for where it says, “other reviews that are not currently recommended.” These filtered reviews are rarely ever seen by prospective customers. And they don’t count toward a business’ overall star rating on Yelp. Check out “How Yelp Marketing Increases Sales,” especially the section on “Yelp marketing for authenticity.” There you’ll learn how to unfilter your positive reviews, boosting your overall Yelp rating.
How to deal with negative Yelp reviews
If your overall Yelp rating is below 4 stars, you need to address the problem of negative reviews. The best way to deal with negative reviews is to drown them out with positive reviews. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about negative reviews. Check out “How to Deal with Bad Yelp Reviews” for more tips and advice on the delicate topic of handling negative reviews.
Above all, don’t ignore negative reviews. Respond to the reviewer via Yelp. But realize that your main audience is not the reviewer. It’s the hundreds or thousands of people who will read the review, and your response, in the future. You have an opportunity to impress many future customers. Show them that you care about your customers and provide great customer service. Show them that you make good when you make a mistake. And even when you don’t fix a problem, show them you’re respectful and listen well to customers. You also have a more immediate opportunity to win over the customer who wrote the negative review. If you’re lucky, they just might change their minds and update the review.
