5 ways to crush Yelp reviews: Get more Yelper reviews - Part 3 of 5

Practice Management

Yelp is like a snobby parrot. It screeches out whatever it hears from its friends, but ignores comments from strangers. These friends are fellow Yelpers, and Yelpers are your best - and practically only - way to get positive Yelp ratings.

smlyelpreviewsglassfingerStep 3: Get More Yelper Reviews - Anyone can write a review for Yelp, but only certain reviews avoid the Yelp Review Filter. Those reviews seen and recorded by search engines are from Yelpers, people who have been identified by Yelp as having content worth posting. The criteria for this designation? Post more than one review to Yelp. And if you have Yelper "friends", you're even more valuable. Those reviews sent in by anyone else are stored at the bottom of the page, hidden under a dropdown that says, in light gray type, "Other reviews that are not currently recommended". In other words, only the Chosen Yelpers get their reviews posted and counted by search engines as star ratings.

 

This seems to point out the obvious: only get reviews from Yelpers. How do you do this? Yelp's review policy discourages businesses from asking for reviews because, they say, this leads to distrust. In some cases, businesses have been banned from Yelp's website for soliciting Yelp reviews.

 

Yelp advises that you make the patient aware that you are on Yelp, but nothing more. Their suggestions include placing a badge on your website for users to click, adding Yelp to your email signature, placing a sign on your door, and other "heads up" tactics. Our suggestion to surgeon clients is to place a standup display with the Yelp QR code and link to their Yelp page. We also recommend printing business cards with the Yelp logo and "Check us out on Yelp" with the Yelp page link. But don't hand them out. Leave them there and Yelpers will see them and, hopefully, pick them up. Non-Yelp people may as well, but you do not want to take specific action seeking reviews. It's simply a heads up.

 

While it may see that we are tip-toeing around Yelp, it is not without good reason. The Federal Trade Commission just dropped a year long investigation into Yelp. Yelp was a subject of a class action suit brought by a dentist alleging unfair practices and "extortion" tying ad purchases to positive ad placements. The court, however, ruled that Yelp was simply, and legally, engaging in "hard bargaining". The courts did not rule on Yelp's business practices as fair and wholesome, only legal.

 

The final way to get more Yelp reviews, or at least remove competitor reviews, is a paid Yelp for Business plan. If you've claimed your Yelp page, you will find offers to remove competitor ads from your page. You'll also be solicited to buy ads that appear within Yelp. Bottom line, spending money on Yelp is frivolous and bending to scare tactics and misinformation. Yelp claims, as do most online ad companies, that their ads drive visitors. The CPC (Cost per Click) for these ads is outrageous and underperforming. The best way to deal with Yelp reviews, is to push them off the page by driving more reviews to other sites and adding content and reviews to your own site. We'll look at this more closely in Part 4: Drive More Reviews to Other Rating Sites.

 

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.

 

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