Current thoughts regarding Yelp

We have talked about this in the past, but times may have changed. I decided to listen to the sales pitch with Yelp tomorrow and would to hear some opinions?

Wasting my time?
What to look out for?

just make your business address listed on yelp in a wealthy area or place with lots of carpet otherwise its not very effective.    

Yelp is very location based.     Our business location has many apartments near by so we get tons of calls who wont pay $125 minimum or are on the 3rd/4th floor.    

We do get enough good calls to make it worth while.         We are constructing our real deal business location in Lynnwood, Wa soon and will switch the yelp location to there..      its not a wealthy area but middle class with tons and tons of cookie cutters that have lots of carpet.

Great tip, I didn't think about the location thing...not much value to a cleaner in a small town then. Maybe I should get a UPS office address location in the bigger city near by?

Most important thing is do NOT let them get you to sign a 1 year contract, 6 years ago I made them to agree to 3 months contract and then automatically goes to month to month unless you cancel it.
Second of all, you should do the pay per click thing instead of impression based advertisement, the pay per click thing unfortunately don't have per click price details like Google AdWords, so you just have to trust them with however many clicks they are giving you for the amount of advertisements you do, I gave up counting them a long time ago, but when I used to count them, it was around $ 6 - $ 7 per click, but that was a few years ago, I'm sure now would probably around $ 10 or more down here in LA market.

Also Yelp customers usually are younger working generation ( 18 - 50 yo ), so like AC said, put your business address in a suburb area where there are more homes than apartments and condos.

Set your price higher because those lower income yelpers always much more mean in their reviews than the higher income ones, so by setting your prices higher, you will get more high rating reviews. I also would be careful interacting with those lower income ones because even though they didn't use your service, they can still give you negative reviews because they interact with you and Yelp wouldn't remove those reviews from your business page.

If I remember anything else, I'll post it later, good luck.

The more I read these things, the less I like the idea at all. In large market areas, I understand the necessity of that form of advertising, but I just don't think it has that much value out in my area. I might be getting to close to the cliff on this one.

I am LISTED on Yelp, but I never have paid for advertising.

I get a monthly report of customer "views" and leads. I have only gotton a few views per month, and no leads to calls, that I know of.

I'm in a small market. So I don't see the good Yelp will do me.

They did offer me a short term contract for three months, but for the price, I have better things to spend my business dollars on.

I prefer blanketing postcards or other direct mail for drumming up new clients.

I am of the same view Freemind. I claimed the listing late at night thinking that maybe it would be a good idea, but all it will probably do is flood my phone with Yelp calls and pop-ups on my computer.

It just doesn't feel like the right vehicle for this area. I think I will pass on the sales call and move on.

Yelp is for yuppies but you did good by claiming your listing. Now go ahead and complete the listing 100 percent, add more photos etc., just dont pay for advertising unless you think it warrants it.

Just by claiming your listing and completing some info put you number 4 on the non paid listings for arlington

The problem Mo is that there are only 2 cleaners in Arlington and I am listed number four.

I cover the smaller towns outside of Omaha where there aren't a lot of companies, but most of the ones in Omaha will be listed in any search of these small towns so I can never climb in the rankings.

I think there is a major flaw in the internet when it comes to searching for a business like in my area. If someone was to google for a carpet cleaner in Blair (for example) they will get 8 pages of companies that are not actually in Blair and never find the ones that are.....or within a few miles of it like me.

I am starting to think that there is no internet advertising that will benefit me in this area and that the old fashion methods are the only good ones available.....local phone book, newspaper, radio.

I would for sure claim the listing like you did and put some really good photos up, get your reviews up to at least 30 good reviews and a high rating...

but I would leave it at that and not pay for any advertising. Youll get some jobs for it.

Remember also that yelp ranks very very high on google so when someone googles "carpet cleaning" many times your yelp listing will be right there.

When people near our business location google "carpet cleaning near me" we come up right there top of first page but its not our website, its our yelp listing.

that is how most all yelp customers find us, they arent actually bringing up yelp website then using the yelp search bar.

just some more info hope it helps

I dont see you on google for carpet cleaning blair nebraska. I added a do follow link to your site for blair nebraska.

Do a search for carpet cleaning blair nebraska add your business to every free listing you see in the top ten for your area

Good to know about the Yelp ranking on Google....didn't realize that at all. In my area if you search Yelp you will not find anyone with a lot of reviews. Even the franchises only have 6-12 reviews.

Do the customer have to be a Yelp member to leave a review?

I viewed your page source and this what I would do.

Change your meta tile to "carpet cleaning and what ever cities you service" instead of castle defenders

Right click on your home page and click view page source and youll see what google is seeing.

If you scroll all the way down on your page source youll notice that your footer is blank, I would also add the cities that your service to the footer

I give up....the internet can kiss my ass!!

I just spent 30 minutes trying to fully update my profile on Yelp and it will not recognize most of the cities in my service area. Hell, it wouldn't even let me select Omaha.....you know the largest F-ing city in the State of Nebraska.

I have no more patience for this kind of crap.

Hire MO to do it for you.

Believe me Matt, I would. Felt like I was working for Yelp all day instead of myself....and ready to quit.

milspec6 wrote:Good to know about the Yelp ranking on Google....didn't realize that at all.  In my area if you search Yelp you will not find anyone with a lot of reviews.  Even the franchises only have  6-12 reviews.

Do the customer have to be a Yelp member to leave a review?

Yes they do have to be a yelp member, membership is free but in my experience if you're not logged in to your yelp account over certain period of time, Yelp will filter their reviews, their system flagged them as suspicious non real reviews.
So the best thing is to have Yelp app and ask your customers to just log in from there, the app is great to look for restaurants and such anyway.

So Yelp is doing new ad program of which after customer is done emailing a business requesting for a quote, they can put your business ad there right in front of them so that they can see your business however in my opinion ( and Dave's as well ) those customers requesting email quotes never contacted us back after we replied and gave them quote ( even after very timely responses ) and I've responded in timely manner for months before I get tired of it and take the "request a quote" feature off of my yelp page.
I told them don't bother putting my ad there, I don't want those customers that request quote over email anyway, they contacted me and this new rep is amazing, he actually listened to me rambling and listened to my feedback and appreciated them and told me that he's willing to change my ad plans up and down without too much restrictions / contracts, I can increase it for a month or two and go back to my original plan, I was like what ?? No one had allowed me to do that before, he was shocked, I asked him if Yelp changed their policy and he said no, it's individual preference, so all of these years all of my account managers are basically just being a dick to me.
Rob, let me know if you're still interested in talking to them, I will ask him if you can contact him directly.

Thanks for the offer, I am going to consider it this weekend. The fiasco of wasting my time trying to include my service areas on their site has really soured me on their operation right now. If they can't even get that right (telling me either they never heard of Omaha or that the city 4 miles from me can't be listed because it is somehow over the 100 mile limit) they are not a wagon I want to hitch to.

I hear you ! In my area, they still list companies from 20 - 30 miles away in the first page ( 10 companies ), I think they try to list companies with more reviews ? Not sure what their algorithms are, I'll try to ask him today, I'm scheduled to talk to him about raising my ads for November and December, I'm going all in these 2 months, my last chance before winter hits and any of the 2 bozos become president

Bob five days ago your site was invisible to google for the carpet cleaning blair Nebarska search term. I added the carpet cleaning blair Nebraska link to my signature in HTML as a "do follow link" and now its listed number 12 in the organic search.

The link in your signature line can not just be a hyper link its has to be a do follow link in HTML.

Ill post the do follow link later so that you ad add it to your signature line.

Top  10 for Blair!!  

Nice Mo !! Good job !! No wonder he's busy

Mo is the man.....seeing some good progress.

Yelp has turned into a huge price shoppers for me, I've gotten a ton of calls after I raise my ads from $ 350 / month to $ 1550 / month, but still crossing my fingers for more quality customer's instead of minimum charge jobs, see what happens next week, if it doesn't blow up then I'm going to blame it on Trump
Before I get killed in here with that comment, it's a joke people