Yelp to Improve Your Local Search Rank
You know online reviews affect your bottom line. You may have heard that word of mouth is the best marketing strategy, but today nearly 80% of consumers trust online reviews as if they were a recommendation from a trusted friend.
Every year more and more people turn to them to find out if the company is reliable.
For local businesses, these facts are even more important: After all, about 50% of mobile searches are local.
That makes sense; If you are traveling and need to find somewhere nearby, turn on your phone and decide where to go based on the reviews.
So how can you do it yourself? One answer is to incorporate Yelp into your SEO strategy.
Not sure where to start? We are with you.
This is how you think like a local SEO agency when it comes to Yelp.Yelp recently introduced a new penalty for websites that aren’t mobile-friendly.
If you want to get noticed on Yelp, you need to make sure your site is optimized for Yelp and mobile searches.
Here are some tips: No popups – Make sure your home page doesn’t have any popups that hide content. Onscreen Ads – Don’t Force Customers to Scroll Ignore users to get to the home page, Yelp will penalize you. Doing these things will make your site more user friendly and keep you in good standing with Yelp.
Don’t ask for reviews Lots of reviews, even good ones, help position your site; Any local SEO company can tell you.
As you collect reviews on Yelp, remember to grow them organically.
Believe it or not, Yelp will penalize you if it suspects you’re trying to improve your ratings.
For example, the examiner determines the rank of the report.
If a reviewer’s account is brand new and they’ve reviewed almost nothing else, Yelp will assume it’s a bogus account and will lower your ranking.
Ditto if several warnings appear at the same time.
If you send a bulk email to customers asking for reviews and suddenly Yelp receives a lot of them at once, your reviews will be penalized.
