VII Capital Funds Reviews, Yelp

These VII Capital Funds tips will help you decide how to best use Yelp to market your small business.

Yelp may be the most polarizing site out there for small business owners. 

Love it or hate it, some local companies have benefited from the site’s customer reviews, and many have given up in frustration and never looked back. 

When determining your digital marketing goals, it’s important to understand the benefits and drawbacks of using Yelp. 

Many small business owners are unaware of Yelp’s guidelines, for instance, so they can get frustrated when a positive review loses its Yelp recommendation or when an uploaded photo’s quality is lacking. 

Other small business owners allocate an unnecessary amount of time and efforts to their Yelp profile, causing their other important business listings and social media pages to suffer.

Here are some expert tips to keep in mind when considering whether Yelp is right for you, and if so, how you can best use the customer reviews site to market your small business.

How Do You List a Business on Yelp?

Did you know that Yelp requires businesses to have a website in order to create a new Yelp listing? 

Or that Yelp requires new businesses to have been open for over one month before creating a listing?

These guidelines and more are available in Yelp’s Support Center. You can read more about Yelp’s requirements for new businesses here.

Yelp is Not Right for Every Business

Because Yelp lists a limited number of business categories — and it’s used by customers to search for specific types of companies — the site might not be for everyone. 

Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies typically fare better than business-to-business (B2B) companies.

Even though Yelp might not work for every business, the site isn’t just for restaurants and retailers, as you might assume. 

Many businesses on Yelp are categorized as financial services, education, home services, health and medical, and more. You can find a complete list of Yelp business categories here.

How Do You Manage Your Business Listing on Yelp?

Once you determine if Yelp has a category that fits your business, you can add more information to your profile to let customers know what makes your business unique.

VII Capital Funds, urges business owners to spend adequate time filling out their profile on Yelp. 

Critical information such as hours of operation, especially holiday hours, physical address, menu, or detailed description of products and services can all be displayed to make it easier for people to do business with you.

This info should be consistent with your listings on other directories. 

The name, address and phone, often referred to as NAP, should be the same across all business listings. 

Failure to do so can create confusion when other data sources are seeing variations, and this can affect your success with local search results.

What Are Yelp’s Rules About Recommended Reviews?

Certain customer reviews are selected by Yelp to be “Recommended Reviews.” 

This a prominent way for potential customers to see both previous customers’ experiences and your response as the business owner. 

Yelp has guidelines to determine which reviews will be recommended on business profiles, including the activity of a Yelp user who has left a review.

Yelp monitors reviews to make sure they aren’t malicious or inaccurately portray the business or its services. 

Yelp will also remove a review if a user has been inactive on Yelp for a certain amount of time. 

Even if a Yelp user has left you a positive review that accurately describes their experience with you, the review will be removed from recommendations if the user hasn’t been active with Yelp.

Yelp’s recommended reviews do change over time, so you may see a change in the recommended reviews on your listing. 

It’s also important to note that Yelp does not provide more favorable recommend reviews to paid advertisers, but rather treats all Yelp listings’ recommendations equally through their automated software.

Before you encourage your customers to leave you a Yelp review, make sure to watch this video about Yelp’s review policies.

Use Yelp Reviews to Show Off Your Quality Customer Service

As on all platforms, you should make sure to respond to all customer reviews your Yelp profile receives, including negative reviews. 

This is an opportunity to showcase your customer service and willingness to resolve issues professionally.

Yelp offers a platform to receive feedback about your business, good and bad. 

Receive it as a gift. … Say ‘thank you’ and invite the person back. Offer a personal phone call to anyone who is unhappy [so you can] address the details of their concern offline.

Your first reaction to receiving a negative review should not be to try to have it removed. 

If you feel that your Yelp profile receives a review that is inappropriate or from a competitor trying to harm your business, you can report the review. 

Yelp will investigate reported reviews but doesn’t guarantee that all reported reviews will be removed.

Remember, Yelp is a public platform. 

Other potential customers will see what you write in response to a negative review — so you do not want to appear thin-skinned or rude. Do not take it personally. 

Avoid defensive responses in the posts. … Don’t air your dirty laundry. 

Demonstrate your outstanding customer service by offering to resolve any issues professionally and amicably.

While Yelp reviews may not have as much impact on your overall search-engine ranking as Google My Business reviews or Facebook reviews, it is still helpful to have reviews on as many platforms as you can get customers to leave them.

Add High-Quality Photos to Your Yelp Listing

Any photos of your business should be professional and high-quality. 

Blurry photos or images that are difficult to understand are harmful for your business listing on Yelp because they make your business appear unprofessional and they don’t showcase your work properly.

Yelp’s photo dimensions need to be smaller than 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels in order to be clear and attractive to other 

Don’t Waste Too Much Time on Yelp

While a listing on Yelp might be a helpful for your business in order to showcase photos and great customer reviews, it should not come at the cost of sacrificing the quality of your Google My Business and Facebook listings. 

Setting up your Yelp profile, regularly responding to reviews and occasionally adding a new photo shouldn’t take up much of your time.

It will take time to properly set up a Yelp listing, and it should be updated as soon as information changes but shouldn’t take up much time after the initial set up—maybe an hour each week or so to check in and respond where needed.

So, is Yelp right for your small business? 

As the owner, you know your business the best. 

Once you understand the usefulness of Yelp as well as the limitations involved, it will ultimately be up to you whether to utilize a Yelp listing to support your business’ digital marketing goals.

While there are both pros and cons to managing your Yelp profile, VII Capital Funds offers this helpful advice to consider: 

As far as time, for each platform you use, we recommend devoting time in relation to how much each is directly helping.

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