04/10/2016 11:10

Reviews online: Dealing With Your Yelp Reviews

Internet and Life Project: ‘90% OF AMERICANS HAVE RESEARCHED A PRODUCT OR SERVICE ONLINE’’46% of American adults say they have posted comments or reviews online and 49% WILL NOT BUY WITHOUT REVIEWS ONLINE.’

YOU DON’T REALLY WANT TO IGNORE THOSE REVIEWS ONLINE, DO YOU?

• Customers will verbally tell their friends and colleagues about their bad experience with your business. They will memorialize their comments at online reviews sites for everyone to, e.g., Yelp, G+, Citysearch.

• You cannot get a Yelp review removed, unless€¦ The reviews online contain inappropriate language (f- bombs etc) or is a personal attack. BUT, there are numerous things you can do to manage a bad online review for your business.

Your Reviews Online:  Be Proactive On Yelp

1. Claim your Yelp listing and respond to the reviews online. www.biz.yelp.com/claiming
2. Actively seek out reviews from your best customers:   Send an email to your best customers with a link to your Yelp page   Have business cards printed with your Yelp address Tip: use a URL shortener like bit.ly to abbreviate the URL on the business card to something like, https://bit.ly/Sd6RCB  Print POP material in your store and ask people to login and review from their smartphones or setup a text-2-review system for the most seamless and efficient results.

 Managing Your Reviews On Yelp

3.  Yelp discourages active solicitation of reviews. Yelp has a heavy-handed algorithm and buries many good and negative reviews.  Whether a review is visible or not depends on things like:  How new is the Yelp account of the reviewer? Has the reviewer ever left other reviews online before? Are all the commenters reviews 5-star? Regardless, you DO need to solicit reviews to manage your brand online. Because now more than ever does the consumer have the buying power in the marketplace