How to Promote Your Business Using Yelp Marketing

If you are in business, you would’ve heard of Yelp. The company is into online advertising, publishing reviews of local businesses that have been crowd-sourced, and they have an online reservation service as well.

In short, if you own and run a local business, marketing on Yelp can be a huge plus for you. This holds even more true if you are a restaurateur.

Read on to know why, and how you can benefit from using Yelp marketing for your business venture.

Yelp: Have You Taken the First Steps?

First things first, check if your business has already been listed on Yelp. If it has, claim ownership and unlock your business page immediately. Otherwise, random visitors can add inaccurate and unflattering information to your business page.

Go through the profiles of your competitors before you start creating your own. See how highly-rated profiles are different from the ones that don’t have such a great rating. Figure out whether it’s the content, images used, or their website link.

Get a Hold, then Begin Building

Once you have an understanding on what drives traffic to you and what has the potential to take traffic elsewhere, use that information to outdo the competition and build an amazing Yelp profile for yourself.

Make sure that your profile includes all the information that a prospective customer will be looking for, and preferably not spread out over several places.

Be extremely careful not to make mistakes with the business name and category, as these are what visitors will see first. Then add in details such as your exact address, contact information, opening hours and a link to your business website.

Once all that is taken care of, get yourself some superb, top quality images and upload them onto your Yelp profile. Don’t stop with just a handful of images, go ahead and create a well stocked gallery. You cannot overestimate the importance of images, they don’t say "a picture says a thousand words” for nothing!

Customer is King

Ratings on Yelp are judged by customer reviews and the all-important star rating. Ensure that you reply to client reviews. Yelp has a feature that allows you to publicly reply to reviews that have been placed on your profile. This is a feature that a lot of business owners seem to overlook, and you shouldn’t fall into the same pit.

Don’t be worried about negative reviews that will almost inevitably pop up on your profile. As long as they point out legitimate issues, you can use them constructively to improve your business. Reply to negative reviews as well, it’ll show viewers that you are genuinely caring. Don’t be shy about taking positive reviews posted outside of Yelp and featuring them on your Yelp profile, with the name of the reviewer attached, of course!

Additionally, Yelp themselves will tell you about their latest tools that can give your business a boost. Read about them and stay as up to date as you possibly can.

Paid advertising on Yelp is another method you could consider, although the free practices mentioned in this article are effective enough for the most part.

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