Yelp is not your mother and won't clean up your room. Your Yelp profile is yours, for better or worse, and you'll want to follow these steps to claim it and clean it up, and make a great first impression.
Step 2: Clean Up Your Yelp Account - If you have not claimed your Yelp account, do so now. A "tell" that you haven't claimed it is the backwards name. Yelp grabs information from various sources and internet listings and uses this found information to create your business page. Often this information about you is last name first, first name last. Regardless of whether your name is correct or not, claim your Yelp page by clicking on the "Claim this business" button at the bottom of the webpage. Depending on the amount of information already populated on the page, the button will be in red or gray, at the bottom left or right. Claiming your page will allow you to do a number of things such as correct your name, address, website links, upload images, etc. If you have a practice website, claiming your Yelp page is critical, as Google considers a link from Yelp as a good reference, even if your Yelp review doesn't show up in search results.
Next, we'll want to take on the ugly part of the Yelp room - the reviews. Yelp has a curious way of ranking which reviews are highest. It's called the Yelp Review Filter. While there are many factors to this, one of the key factors is Yelper rank. If a patient leaves a review of you, and has also left a review of a dog grooming salon, a taco food truck, a grocery store, and other establishments in the city, they have more "authority" despite the fact that their review is nothing more than an opinion. Other factors, including number of Yelp friends, date of review, proximity of review, and likely position of moon and tides cause your reviews to shift in whatever order the Yelp Filter calculates. While you can't change the order, you can look at the reviews and determine what action to take.
My personal preference when asked about responding to reviews is to do nothing. But not for the reason you think. Content added to your Yelp page is detected by search engines as change, and change is good. You are actually helping Yelp move up the ranks whenever you respond, good or bad. We want Yelp to be dormant, and wither away. But if you feel you must respond...
If you have negative reviews, be very cautious about responding to them. Yelp has multiple ways to respond, public and private, and, if absolute lies are told, Yelp offers the opportunity to request removal, but it is very difficult. Your best course of action in responding is to do nothing at all, or respond short and sweet, regardless of how inflammatory the comments may be. You should ask friends to look at the reviews and tell you which ones are most concerning. You are not the best judge of what patients really take to heart. For example, one of our clients has a review on Yelp that he was very concerned about. The review was dated November or this past year, so it was quite fresh. The patient was an active Yelper with 5 other reviews so Yelp valued this person because of their frequency. The post was rather long and detailed. Our client was very concerned because of the doubts cast upon his treatment, and what their response should be. We counseled him not to worry too much about this one-star review because the Yelp post began "It's been 23 years since my surgery..." Obviously this person felt like venting today. We advised the doctor to send a private message to her and ask her to contact the office to discuss her dissatisfaction if they felt they needed to do something, but not to respond publicly as the post itself showed the venting of a perpetually unhappy person. And we've all been there.
If you must respond, do so professionally and succinctly. You'll find the majority of the dissatisfied patients are not unhappy with you, but with the wait time, the tone of the front desk, or something else that put them off. Unless the post is very slanderous or inaccurate, do not respond. If you do, a response such as "We are sorry you felt our service was not what you expected. We welcome the opportunity to talk to you about your concerns so we can make a better experience for you and all our patients. Please contact us at your convenience." The ball is now in their court, you addressed the inconvenience (not their idea of what is wrong), and showed you want to make things right. When you respond, do not say the same thing every time. Be fair, truthful, and succinct. But only respond to current reviews. There is no value responding to any review a year or more older.
Positive reviews can also work against you. People read Yelp reviews like potato chips - more than one, and sometimes the whole bag. If you have ecstatic reviews that are less than genuine, it seems like you are sponsoring fake reviews. A certain doctor in Los Angeles has a review that a high rated Yelper posted. It screams insincerity, is literally a page long, and has links and photos embedded. Its not clear whether this doctor asked the Yelper to post this (investigation reveals its his cousin) or whether she truly feels this way, but the "damage" is done despite the 5 stars. And some "positive" reviews on Yelp result in a one star rating. We see this over and over - a patient complains loud and long about the staff, wait time, air conditioning, etc. but the doctor is just amazing. Yelp reviews can be edited. If you know the patient, and know their intent, discreetly ask them if they'd mind editing their review to be a little less enthusiastic, or perhaps upgrade the stars based on you, not your staff. Again, short and sweet is the rule.
We've mentioned Yelpers repeatedly in this article. How do you identify a Yelper? What can you ask them to do? Learn more in Part 3 of this series, Get More Yelper Reviews.
Dick Pepper is President of VoxMD, a medical marketing and technology company, and creator of PracticeRate, a reputation management and marketing tool. Visit VoxMD at http://voxmd.com, and feel free to ask questions at info@voxmd.com.