What is your experience with Yelp? Does it help with your business?

600 Comments

Answers (21-30)

Business from East Lyme, CT
Answered on Jan 12th, 2018

99% of your business is from word of mouth.. I do not like or use Facebook or yelp as well as any other such services as results are poor..you have to have a webpage as many looking for something will use their iPhone on a internet search..people today want everything no patience.. so these search directories in general are poor choices unless they are geared just for your trade

Regards

Mark

The Locksmith co LL

I've had a client in the past that used Yelp ads for a total of 4 months, the contact with Yelp was only a short one. One of the main issues that I have with the Yelp Ads was the categories that sites can show up for. At that time it was far too broad so you couldn't exclude your site from certain categories if you want. Also, there's the chance that non related sites to your exact category can show up with an ad for they cover a broad topic area. This is an issue for Lawyers or Bankruptcy industry from my experience.

If one is contemplating Yelp Advertising, do some research and see what sites are showing up in your categories, are they exact matches for the services of that category. They had 3,6,9 or longer term contracts.

The quality of the traffic from Yelp can be good and their support dept was great as well, but their paid advertising still needs work. It's not near the level of Adwords for example where you can a lot of control of where your site can show.

Would I totally rule it out based on one companies experience? No, but you need to do research for your industry and see if it's a good fit.

Hello Lucy,


So far our experience with Yelp has not been positive. We actually tested their "Pay" system for several months. We were not satisfied with their process for reviews and cancelled this service. We found if a customer of ours left a review regarding our company but this customer had never utilized the Yelp review process before, the review that we would rely on for our business would not be visible on our "Yelp" page. In order for Yelp to allow these reviews to be visible our customer needed to be an active "Yelp" user and reviewer.

My only experience was a phony sales call encouraging me to spend 3,000.00 for guaranteed placement. I say phony because apparently the sales pitch is a third party scam. Yelp is not a platform that spending time on for my business. I use it when I travel and like it a lot. It doesn't drive traffic to my business.

I encourage clients to put the lions share of their time and money in the digital assets they own and control (Website, Blog, Videos over you tube, vimeo) and so on...) not so much on social sites and directories that are owned and controlled by others.