Matt Tillotson
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How to get your business listed on Yelp -- and how to use it as a growth engine

For small businesses of all kinds, the need to converse with customers online, on platforms of their choosing, continues to strengthen. Yelp is a prime example; it's a growing force in local reviews, balanced and fair or otherwise. The conversation happens with or without you -- so shouldn't your business participate?

Yelp has become the go-to site for local business reviews. Businesses need to get onboard, listen and participate on the site:

Since its launch in 2004, Yelp caught on pretty quickly and has seen consistent growth. Yelp currently has over 5.5 million reviews in the site. Google Analytics says Yelp has had 20.5 million unique visits in the past 30 days.

[...]

Along the way, Yelp has decimated most of its competitors. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said “goodbye” to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy’s Book closed their doors in October 2007. CitySearch remains as Yelp’s lone competitor in the local reviews space. To date, Yelp has raised 31 million in capital.

Techcrunch goes on to say that a strong part of Yelp's appeal is its strong focus on the mobile experience, especially the iPhone:

In the next few days, Yelp will be launching a new version of its popular iPhone app which we’ve reviewed. The new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its exiting GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write reviews directly from their iPhone through a Twitter-like “Quick Tips” feature that allows users to create 140 character tips. This was sorely lacking in the original version. The tips will be accessible on the iPhone app and the site itself (if popular) and will also be shown in a feed using GPS capabilities when users search businesses. Like before, the app leverages GPS in the iPhone to list reviews, tips, and photos written and taken around a users location.

All this means that it is increasingly important for businesses to make sure they are listed -- and then are actively participating -- on Yelp. Thanks to some recent changes instituted by the site, businesses can now respond to customer reviews, which makes participation even more important.

Getting your business listed on Yelp

To get your local business listed on Yelp, start here. Yelp says:

Claiming your business page involves three simple steps:

  1. Setup your business owner account.
  2. Answer a quick automated verification phone call. This allows us to protect you and your business.
  3. Go to Yelp for Business Owners

Talking with customers on Yelp

Once your business is listed, there's a number of promotional tools you can utilize to enhance your listing: photographic slide shows, badges touting your reviews to share on your own web site and more. Yelp has more info on how to build out your listing.

But talking with customers is more important than tricking out your Yelp presence. Yelp now allows businesses to respond to reviews -- both positive and negative:

In an e-mail sent out to the service's "Elite users," one of Yelp's local community managers Don Bourassa said the service is being set up to give business owners a way to provide constructive feedback in a public forum, as the current system requires businesses to correspond with users through private messages.

"The goal is for all comments to be pleasant and useful," Bourassa said. "For example, if you wrote a glowing 5-star review some months ago about your favorite pub, in which you mention drinking Harp because they didn't carry Guinness...both you and other readers would probably be happy to see a new comment saying, 'Just got our Guinness tap last week. Hope to see you soon!'"

To help regulate the system, business owner comments are given an even more stringent policy than its guidelines for user comments. The company has put up a guide that clarifies what businesses should and should not do with the new system. Any owner-written comments that are deemed disparaging, attacking, or pandering with some sort of incentive will be removed by Yelp's staff.

Yelp has put together a guide on the right and wrong ways for businesses to respond to customer comments.

Creative approaches to dealing with negative comments

  • Duct Tape Marketing has some sound advice on going on the offensive in a positive way.
  • Love the story (linked the same Duct Tape post) on Delfina Pizzeria. The San Francisco-based restaurant got fed up with some baseless negative reviews and flipped them into something positive: the printed up the most absurd comments and put them on T-shirts. Great way to create positive buzz out of negativity.
  • The obvious advice is to stay cool and not post something you'll regret later. Every response reflects on your business. So when reviews are negative -- or just flat out wrong -- answer them with facts, politeness and empathy. Repeat after me: facts, politeness and empathy.

Yelp and similar local review sites provide a useful, but flawed, system. Review writers have a degree of anonymity and little accountability for what they write (though there are cases of fighting back; a dentist and a chiropractor sued individual Yelp reviewers in separate cases for libel). But local businesses ignore Yelp at their own peril. As with most things social media, the conversation takes place about your business with or without you. Wouldn't you prefer to participate?