Yelp Profile: Elevate Your Business with Key Optimization Strategies

Yelp is an American company that posts crowd-based reviews to help consumers make the right buying decision. Yelp has become a popular tool amongst many consumers. Whether a business owner or a consumer, you've probably used Yelp. In fact, it's the third most popular online review site. Because it is the third most popular site, we know Yelp is an effective marketing tool.

The Definition of Yelp

Yelp is a review platform used by millions of people every day. With this popularity comes an opportunity to get your small or medium-sized business some excellent search engine optimization (SEO). Yelp's version of the Google index isn't as powerful as the Google search engine. However, Yelp still has over 178 million unique visitors each month. This generates 20 million U.S. leads and helps local businesses attract potential customers. It is estimated that Yelp generates over 9 trillion searches per year across all platforms combined.

You can think of Yelp as a social media platform that provides a user review system. It has over 57 million reviews. Yelp has a significant following with reviews from (but not limited to) restaurants, retail stores, hotels, doctors, spas, schools, and even financial institutions.

They have also expanded their reach with Yelp deals. Yelp deals offer exclusive discounts to users in select cities. As a result, the statistics are huge, and the traffic is often free. However, if you want those shiny 5-star ratings to stay put, you must pay careful attention to your Yelp profile.

Tips on How to Optimize Your Yelp Profile

Yelp has grown tremendously over the years. We have seen different new attributes that get added and how they benefit Yelp users as a whole. Have you noticed that your Yelp profile appears on the search engine results pages (SERP)? It's true! Your Yelp profile can appear in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results when people search for your business. However, potential visitors may click on a different Yelp link if your page does not appear strong enough. To avoid this, you need to optimize your Yelp listing.

Here Are Five Ways to Optimize Your Yelp Profile:

1. Take the Time to Complete Your Yelp Business Profile

If you're new to Yelp, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. The first step is to fill in your data.

• How much information should you include?
• Where should you place your phone number?
• What should be in your profile box?

Complete your profile today and enjoy the benefits later on. If you're a local business owner, getting your Yelp profile in tip-top shape is important. Yelp is constantly changing, with new restaurants, hotels, and services being added. On average, people fill out about 28% of the info on their profiles. Filling out the profile will help you pick up the traffic that was passing you by in the past.

Start with the basics and fill in your company name, contact information, business hours, and email address. You will also be required to fill in details like your business locations. You need to have this information about each service area on your Yelp business page because this is most likely where new customers will come to find you. Next, give as much information as possible about making an order. For example, do you accept credit cards, provide Wi-Fi, or offer delivery? This might seem simple, but Google uses this information to rank your page.

2. Optimize Your Content

Yelp is arguably the best social media site for local businesses to build brand awareness. It is highly respected, user-generated, and constantly evolving. Yelp can help you connect with a potential consumer in minutes. It is a powerful tool that allows many business owners to harness social capital to drive online leads. That is why optimizing the content you put on Yelp with correct keywords is important.

If you want to get to the top of Yelp and the top of other search results, you will have to start using some Yelp SEO strategies. Other local services in your area will try their best to be visible, so you should too!

Similar to traditional SEO, Yelp SEO strategies heavily depend on ranking for the right keywords. While you don't get to include much copy on Yelp, it can still count for something.

Using relevant keywords is a direct ranking factor for all search engines, including Yelp. So your keyword research should be a high priority for you when optimizing your business page. When thinking of creating content for Yelp, be concise. Make sure the information you put out there plainly states what you want people to know about you. This is especially true if you are just starting a new business. Optimizing your business listing by paying attention to your local SEO would be best. So make sure you're ranking for the right search queries.

Your Yelp profile is one of the most important assets you can create for your business. It links directly to search results, leading customers to book your services.

Including the right key phrases is how you will attract that traffic. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people use Yelp to search for things like restaurant recommendations and restaurant reviews. While this can be great for all types of businesses, some people have found that optimizing their Yelp profile has a more significant effect on getting new leads and increasing revenue than other marketing strategies.

3. Carefully Decide on Your Yelp Categories

When you're ready to start optimizing your Yelp profile, you should first figure out which Yelp categories will best support your business.

There are 3 general types of Yelp categories:

1. local businesses
2. cuisine
3. events

Local businesses and cuisine are very specific and target a small local group of people. On the other hand, events tend to be more general and may or may not have an element of local focus. For example, an outdoor club could be considered local, while a jewelry show or a wine tasting might not be. Locally focused businesses make it easy for potential clients to find you. That does not mean you should not limit yourself to the local market. You can expand outside your local area by promoting events larger than regional in scope, but smaller in scale.

How you choose the categories is important, especially the location-based ones. Every location-based category has a minimum and maximum requirement. These are set for each specific Yelp region. For example, in New York City, a local restaurant near Times Square must specify how close they are to that location. It would be best if you also considered choosing categories that will help you describe your business to potential customers. Let us say, for example, that you have a local catering business in Alabama. It might be helpful to include in your Yelp profile how close you are to popular locations like Tuscaloosa or Birmingham.

4. Include Images on Your Yelp Profile

Use tons of images to make your Yelp business page more engaging. People tend to interact more with these types of pages. Plus, search engines also rank pages with pictures higher. It is not only limited to photos you upload to the page yourself. It also helps when your customer includes images in the reviews they leave for you.

Including pictures on your Yelp profile helps customers find you more easily. When you post a review, your photo is at the top of the page, and other users can click through to read the full text. In addition, seeing a picture of your restaurant or product leads users to more information about your business. This is especially true if you have a lot of locations. Many business owners use pictures for inspiration when designing their locations.

Yelp knows that pictures help people understand you better. This is especially true with reviews about restaurants, hotels, or other businesses with multiple locations. It also knows that crowdsourcing allows businesses to retain customers by providing a way for people to contribute to the conversation. Yelp believes showing some of this information or content on your Yelp profile could encourage other interactions with businesses, further improving your reputation and opportunities for future reviews.

5. Always Respond to Your Reviews

When Yelp first launched, the company had no idea how to handle customer reviews properly. This led to a lot of confusion and frustration for new Yelp users. Over time, the company has improved its systems to accommodate customer feedback. Many business owners have found that systematically responding to their customer's reviews on Yelp can produce better results. The same approach should also be taken in the case of negative reviews.

You have probably heard the best way to get more positive reviews is to be helpful, polite, and courteous in your reviews, regardless of the star rating.

It's not about the number of reviews. Each rating contributes to your overall success. At the same time, these things are certainly helpful in getting more high reviews.

Yelp has much more to say about a business than just how helpful you were in your experience. Yelp is also about telling the positive or negative experiences with a business. It's a really important part of building a brand.

Knowing how to respond to reviews is a proven way to transform complaints into happy customers. Yelp keeps track of how often reviews are posted to ensure you respond quickly if there's a problem. When a lot of people are posting positive reviews or good reviews, that can help build popularity. However, when many people post negative reviews, it can hurt your brand's reputation. Your user reviews are supposed to help build reputation and authority, improving your visibility in your favorite search engines. However, bad reviews could make it harder to get future business to your restaurant or location-based service.

Conclusion

Yelp is a great review source. Millions of people search for local businesses on Yelp each month. It is the world's most popular local platform to use if you want to rank well on search engine result pages.

If you are a business that is interested in digital marketing, then you should start investing some time and effort into your Yelp business page. If you have a business, make use of the different ways to optimize your Yelp profile. This is how you will start to generate more Yelp leads.

Similar to Facebook, Yelp is where users go to post a review about a business. Your Yelp page, once it has been optimized, can be an excellent source of great reviews. Yelp reviews are highly regarded in many industries.

Being listed on Yelp is essential to local search engine optimization and can bring you a lot of new customers.

When creating your Yelp business page:

• answer all the questions accurately
• upload high-quality photos
• remember to complete your profile with powerful calls to action
• explore each feature available
• add information about your store's history, plans for expansion, new products, etc.

Don't forget Yelp has about 90 million unique visitors per month and millions of reviews. You can use Yelp to rank in major cities quickly with a high-quality profile. Whether you're using the Yelp app or the web version, there's no reason that you shouldn't get the most out of your Yelp use.

Want to learn how to optimize your Yelp profile? Talk to one of our growth specialists at gardenpatch today!