Five Tips to Manage Yelp Reviews Online
Yelp is now the granddaddy of business-to-consumer (B2C) directories. Yelp lets folks find and contact your business—pretty clutch when your top priority is bringing people in the door. But it’s also the de facto arbiter of your company’s web reputation.
A good Yelp rating means good times. A bad one? Ouch. And since reviews are the platform’s lifeblood, as well as the most visceral indicator of your customers’ overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction, it’s critical to know how to manage Yelp reviews effectively.
Fortunately, Yelp cares about its reputation too. In the past, the company has been maligned for its lax publication standards. After years of bad press, it now looks serious about addressing fraudulent content, such as baseless negative reviews posted by a competing business owner (or posters he’s paying). So take heart—and use these five tactics to put Yelp in your corner.
1. Claim ownership right away
This is the first step to beating back your Yelp critics. On Yelp, you need to “claim” your business before you can respond to individual reviews—or do pretty much anything. Once you have control over the listing, you can begin reaching out to disgruntled reviewers in a positive, constructive manner, addressing their concerns and offering to make things right.
2. Encourage friends and repeat customers to post positive reviews
Gaming Yelp’s system by paying people (or offering a quid pro quo, like free services) to post glowing reviews isn’t allowed (see note on this below), but you can certainly encourage satisfied customers and associates to post positive reviews. They don’t have to be five-out-of-five star, “THIS IS THE BEST BUSINESS EVER!!!”-type reviews, just honest posts that highlight your company’s positive attributes. In fact, over-the-top reviews are often flagged by Yelp as being suspicious.
Today software plays a big part in finding fake Yelp reviews. While we don’t know for sure, we think that indicators like:
• Too many 5-star reviews
• A sudden change in the number of reviews
• Repeat reviews from the same IP address
• Certain language like ‘the best!’
• ALL CAPS
• New Yelp accounts
…all contribute to fake review flags.
3. Flag untrue reviews immediately
From time to time, you’ll get a really bad review from someone who just can’t be satisfied. Whatever the reason—maybe the person has an axe to grind with you personally or has been “encouraged” a competitor—many people feel it’s best not to engage with these folks directly if you think it could lead to an online flame-war. But if they post blatantly untrue or defamatory statements, Yelp allows users to flag the review as inappropriate.
4. Use consumer alerts to your advantage
Yelp has a relatively new feature called Yelp Consumer Alerts, which basically lets users know that a given business has tried to purchase positive reviews. (Now you see why, per #2 above, this isn’t a good idea.) It can get tricky, but you may be able to use this feature to your advantage. How? If you suspect that a suspiciously well-reviewed competitor business is cutting corners in its pursuit of positive press, drop Yelp’s customer service department a line. They’ll do the rest.
5. Become a social butterfly
Last but not least, drum up good press for your company via social media (and local media). Become a visible member of the community, both online and offline, whether it’s by sponsoring charities or running regular Facebook and Twitter contests. Such moves can trigger subconscious reactions in impressionable customers, making it more likely that they’ll portray your business in a positive light. And, hey, it feels good to give back too.
A note about creating fake Yelp reviews
Yelp states that online reputation companies can’t post fake reviews or boost reviews. Though we don’t create positive reviews for Yelp or manipulate them, we can say that writing fake Yelp reviews is absolutely possible and successfully done every day. Its such a big problem that Yelp has poured millions into trying to combat it. But lets be serious: If your company was being driven out of business by bad Yelp reviews and had no other options, wouldn’t you hire a company to create fake Yelp reviews? If you have nothing to lose, why not? There are companies out there that help write fake Yelp reviews—we’re just not one of them (sorry, we can’t recommend any either). Here is text from a Craigslist ad asking for writers who will write false reviews:
Companies that write fake reviews
Be warned: The vast majority of reputation management companies that write fake reviews are themselves fake. The companies that succeed are very careful, and use aged profiles filled with hand-written, location specific reviews—most of which are real. They specialize in specific geographic areas, and often have people visit the actual location and write reviews from their phone after performing a search for the business on Yelp. In other words, the reviews they write are so well done that they’re almost real.
Our advice is to try every white-hat (above-board) method you can long before embarking on a false review program to fix a Yelp problem.
