Welcome back to Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki.
This week, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite site – Yelp. In today’s video, I’m gonna tell you how to recover all of those awesome reviews you got that Yelp decided to filter out and hide.
I’ll just come out and say it – Yelp sucks. We all hate it, but unfortunately, since it feeds the review stars on Apple Maps, we can’t ignore it. How many customers will you lose when they pull out their iphone to get directions, and on Apple Maps, you show as only having one or two stars?
For some wacky reason, Yelp has decided that if someone’s not a “regular Yelp user”, their reviews don’t count as much. In fact, if a user has only left one or two reviews, those reviews will almost always get filtered and not show on the business’s profile – or count in the aggregate review score.
So today I’m here to save the day, and make Yelp suck just a little bit less… ok, not really, it’s still going to suck just as much, but I’m going to help you get some of those reviews back.
This tip will help you increase your review count AND increase your aggregate score – without having to get any new reviews! All you need to do is reach out to those reviewers and ask them to do just a little bit more…
Go log in to your Yelp profile, and scroll to the bottom – and you’ll see a grey link to the X number of reviews “that are not currently recommended”. Write down all the names of the reviewers who left 5 star reviews in the filtered section.
You can try to contact them inside of Yelp, but since they’re not regular Yelp users, they probably won’t see the message. Your best bet is to look them up in your CRM – the names in Yelp are real names, so it should match customer data in your CRM. If you don’t have a CRM, you can try looking them up on Facebook and message them there.
Send each reviewer a message and thank them for writing an awesome review, but explain that Yelp’s strict review filter hides any reviews from people it considers to be non-active Yelp users. Ask them to leave a few new reviews for other local businesses that they like and to make a few friend connections in the Yelp app to people that they know… explain that a few new reviews and friend connections will make Yelp think that they’re regular users and the awesome review they wrote for you will pop out of the filter and start showing for others to see.
BOOM – it’s that easy. When we do Yelp review outreach campaigns like this, we usually see about a 20 to 25 percent response rate. So if you’ve got 25 filtered positive reviews, that means you’ll probably get at least 4 or 5 of those reviews to jump out of the filter and start counting for your business.
If you’ve got a lower score on Yelp, just a little bit of effort can help you look a lot better – so get out there and get those filtered reviews back!
Now it’s time – put your hand on the screen right here…
BOOM.
We totally just high-fived cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki, and don’t forget to come back next week for another awesome video.
See you next Tuesday!