To Yelp Or Not To Yelp?

We had only five star ratings from Yelp so we considered buying ads. During the process, I was told that Yelp has a "secret" algorithm to determine placement, but they clearly are able to override it. We paid for their ads during a trial period and received great response. Once our competitor signed on, our response rate plummeted. Yelp told us to buy more ads. We cancelled. Suddenly we received numerous one and two star reviews from people that never came to our store. The secret algorithm moved all our great reviews out of sight and gave prominence to all our bad reviews. Yelp said they could do nothing about it. A few weeks later I heard about a doctor who had the same experience and sued them. He won the lawsuit because they had purposely hurt his reputation. My recommendation—Avoid Yelp like the plague.

Here are some additional issues. Yelp, in my opinion, has very unscrupulous business practices. I find their marketing program to be way to aggressive and with over 400 businesses telling me their less than impressive ROI, mafia style business model, and questionable billing is not a place that a business wants to be found on. 

The Many Problems with Yelp

Yelp Craters

Also, Raymond Fong wrote his experience with Yelp here:

A Candid Yelp Advertising Review – Is Yelp Ripping People Off?

Their business model, in my opinion, targets small businesses that are not internet marketing savvy and has an old style boiler room sales force. They are not good for business, and really drive bad behavior for consumers.

I also had a pretty bad experience with Yelp. I finally went with them after they kept calling me and pitching me the service. The sales lady I was talking to had some solid testimonials as part of her pitch, but in the end, I spent $500 per month for 4 months and never saw ONE lead from Yelp. Complete waste of money.

Things might be different in a larger market, but for my industry (Web Design, SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads), Yelp did not produce any leads.

I've just started doing Google Ads for my own business and I'm now starting to get great leads, at $10 to $20 per click. These leads are now starting to turn into more business.

I spent way too much time on the phone w/ a Yelp salesperson. They've very aggressive bullies IMO, and I believe their ethics are questionable to put it nicely. My rec. would be not to support a company like this.

I just checked my yelp reviews. I have 29 reviews showing on top and 63 in the hide box on the bottom. So a total of 92. I have 3 1 star reviews, one of them is showing. The other 2 are in the hide box. I have around 4 4 star reviews. And the vast majority (Around 85) of my reviews are 5 star reviews. So how happy should I be that 61 excellent reviews are in my hide box?

I have had nothing but bad experiences with Yelp. Just update your Yelp profile so people can find you if they search that way, otherwise it is a waste of money and they harass you constantly.

Not to YELP. Totally agree with the hard sell. No real way to defend yourself against bogus retaliatory reviews. I have heard of one business owner who fell victim this. One vengeful client weaponized the YELP reviews with friends and bogus accounts. It's MY business. MY information. YELP has no right to put me on their site.

We paid for it for one year after having the free site. We did not find it was worth the money. Do we get customers who found us on Yelp? YES! However, most of the people who come from yelp have small jobs that would never pay for the monthly bill. People today first check Yelp reviews before buying from most places, so the page itself is major PR.

In my opinion it is a complete waste of money. Also don't like their tactics.

I can’t stand Yelp. When they’ve called me  in past they’ve been aggressive and to expensive. I never paid for their services. But I did waste my time a couple times listening to them in how great they make themselves out to be. I have some reviews on my Yelp page that are very much real from real people that Yelp’s algorithms see as bogus. Yelp is annoying. I can’t even delete old pictures off of my page because I added some of my pictures as a customer instead of directly adding as a business owner on my business portal.