How To Improve Your Rating on Yelp

What do consumers think about when they think 'online reviews'. Often, their mind immediately goes to Yelp.

And this is borne out in real world experiences: a recent Harvard study on Seattle restaurants found that a one-star improvement in Yelp rating lead to a 5 to 9 percent increase in revenue.

In fact, very few Yelp reviews can have enormous impact on your business' bottom line, because:

So it's important to have a strong understanding of Yelp and the system it uses to ensure Yelp is driving revenue growth for your firm.

What makes Yelp Different

Yelp is unlike Facebook or Google reviews in several notable ways. For one, your review quality is more important than your quantity. Whereas a plethora of Google reviews will help improve your ranking in the search engine, with Yelp it's all about your overall score.

The aforementioned Harvard study also found that consumers pay less attention to the other aspects of your Yelp profile. The benefits or failings noted in individual reviews, and the number of reviews, are both secondary to the score you receive out of five.

As well, Yelp's brand is staked on the veracity of its reviews, and it works much harder than its competitors to provide an honest sample of real customer reviews.

This means that firms often have more screened reviews than approved ones. This has a huge impact on your firm's Yelp rating and on your bottom line.

If you don't know what screened reviews are, you're not alone. They are the domestic servants of the Yelp Victorian castle, making up the majority of the users but entirely invisible and irrelevant to onlookers.

If you scroll to the bottom of a Yelp business page, you see this:

These reviews are the key to improving your Yelp score.

They have been filtered out because Yelp finds them untrustworthy - this may be because of the user's profile, the length of the review, or because of certain keywords in the review. But many or most of these screened reviews are fully legitimate. And you can get them approved by taking some small steps.

The easiest way is to reach out to the filtered reviewers that have reviewed you positively. Yelp has taken steps recently to prevent you from contacting these users. However, many small businesses can still recognize their former customers and contact them. If you simply ask for a link to their profile, then you and others can 'follow' them, improving their standing in Yelp and potentially bumping their review out of the filter.