Yelp is a social sharing and recommendation app that helps people find the best events, restaurants, bars, clubs and pop-ups.

• Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Login
• Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Online
• Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Account

Learn how to optimize your Yelp business page to improve your Yelp SEO rankings in just 5 easy steps, and find out the NUMBER ONE YELP RANKING FACTOR. This will help you get on the first page or top 10 of Yelp. Yes, even Yelp has their own ranking algorithm, and you can do “Yelp SEO” by doing.

If you run a business that relies on local search traffic for the majority of your custom, then Yelp is an essential asset to your business’ online strategy.

Launched in 2004, Yelp is the go-to resource for millions of visitors to look for information about local businesses. It allows users to check-in at businesses, rate them, review them, comment on other reviews, share photos, and engage in discussions around the business.

Fortunately for you, businesses can also establish a presence on Yelp to communicate with the community of users built up on the app. This puts you in the driver’s seat where your business is concerned, and allows you to harness this incredible platform to grow your customer base.

In this article, we’re going to take you step by step through how you can master Yelp, and describe the benefits in detail as we go.

Google is always looking at the engagement searchers and you, as the owner, are having with your Google My Business listing. The more interaction, the better your chances of ranking higher in the local three-pack and organic rankings in general. That means you need to keep optimizing your Google My Business listing. One way to find out how to improve Google search rankings for your business is by keeping up with your competitors. When it comes to keyword research, that means consistently monitoring which SEO keywords your competitors are using to reach their audience and where they rank for these keywords. Again, we don't advocate cheating Yelp, but if we owned a small business and business wasn't hot, we would lie awake at night thinking about it. There's also a legal way to improve your rating.

How To Get Started On Yelp

If your business has been recently established, you may not even be listed on Yelp. Fortunately, the app has a comprehensive infrastructure for helping you register your business, or take control of it if it has already been listed on the app.

If the business is already listed…

Visit the Claiming Page and click “claim my business”.

If you searched for your business and couldn’t find it, simply click “add business to Yelp” at the bottom of the page.

If your business has already been unlocked, that means someone else has already claimed your business. You need to get in contact with Yelp to find out how that happened, and prove you’re the real owner to reclaim the account.

If your business has been listed by users, you can unlock it. You’ll be expected to provide your first and last name, email address, a password, and as with any app, agree to the Yelp terms of service. This will create the business account for you to start posting.

If you have any issues creating your business account on Yelp, the Yelp For Business Owners section of the site has all the information you should need.

Making Your Presence Felt On Yelp

Having a business profile on Yelp is only the first step into this exciting social sphere. It provides you with opportunities to include key terms that will make a big difference to your local SEO, while simultaneously allowing you to engage with real community members to maximize conversions.

If you list business on Yelp, you must then engage with how Yelp works:

1) Complete your business Yelp profile

Once you’ve registered your business, you need to enrich it with detail. You want to provide all the information that people could want. This means:

• The business name, of course, and its category.
• Important Information. You need your opening hours, price range, parking information, and any other important details like outdoor seating.
• About your business. A good description of the business, why you started it, and what customers can expect.
• Address and phone number. Where are you and how can you be contacted?
• Include a link to your website, and menus. Whatever it is you sell, make sure people can get to it straight from Yelp.
• Quality photo. The internet is a visual medium, so having attractive pictures of your venue, menu and events will get people engaged and interested. Try and sum up the atmosphere of your business in your profile picture.
• OpenTable.com reservations. Register to make it as easy as possible for people to reserve a table with you. You want as few obstacles in the way of people booking with you as possible.

2) Create A Strong Photo Gallery

Yelp creates a huge opportunity for your business to stand out. As more businesses catch on, it will only ever become more competitive, so you need to make sure you stand out from the start.

I recommend hiring a professional photographer to capture the spirit and personality of your business when it’s in full swing. You should aim for visual storytelling above all.

Always capture moments that help show what the experience will be like for future customers.

You should also include a photo or two of the front of your business, during day and night if those are your opening times, as well as a view from the road. Your customers will then be able to recognize your business as they drive by and approach.

3) Utilize Keywords

Google, Bing and other major search engines index Yelp results, so optimizing your profile in the same way your website would will help you to improve your rankings, as well as creating some nice opportunities for backlinks as people link to your website and Yelp profile online.

Hyphenet is a good example. Look at how they target their keywords in Yelp profile.

Backlinks are especially important for Local SEO, so consider doing some networking with Yelp Community members and guest posting on their blogs, writing a press release about your new Yelp presence and any incentives you may be making exclusive to Yelp users, or simply wait for the natural traffic to increase by itself.

4) Customer Reviews Are The Most Precious Currency

They add what is called social proof to your business. Every business says it’s great, but if people who aren’t personally invested say the same, it counts for a lot more.

Glowing reviews on Yelp are a prized resource for local businesses.

These quotes can be recycled too. You can feature them on your website, Facebook and Twitter by using the reviewer’s first name.

Reviews that happen to include keywords can also positively affect Google rankings for a business for those keywords, meaning establishing your language can pay dividends if users mirror it.

As positive as good reviews can be, bad reviews can also have silver linings. Think of them as drawing your attention to things you hadn’t considered about your business. These areas for improvement will strengthen your business in the long term.

Yelp is a community that wants things to be great – it’s rare to see vindictive or abusive reviews, and they can be dealt with very quickly.

In the meantime, treat negative reviews respectfully and responsively, and if the constructive criticism improves your customers’ experience, you’ll turn even more people into fans.

5) Respond To Reviews

We just touched on this above, but responding respectfully to reviews is paramount. You can publicly respond to reviews placed on your business profile.

Whenever anyone has taken the time to contact you and give feedback on their experience, the only appropriate response is gratitude.

This doesn’t mean responding with a standardized “Thank you for your commentsâ€x9D, it means really engaging with the content and responding to it appropriately.

If someone has made a complaint and there’s a context for it that the person wasn’t aware of – share these extenuating circumstances while making it clear you’re not using it as an excuse. Apologise, and show how you intend to rectify the situation.

You should also be sure to respond to positive reviews. Thank them for coming in and for their kind words.

By being quick to respond to people on Yelp, you demonstrate how hard you’re working to provide the best customer experience.

Because Yelp is so good for reviews, you should be encouraging people to sign up to Yelp if they haven’t already.

• Link to Yelp on your website. This will help people see other users’ reviews and help you get more people to sign up and post them.
• Put your Yelp link in your email signature. Anyone signed up to your email list is bound to be a fan, or at the very least a repeat customer. These people are far more likely to post positive reviews, while the location information will help people find you on the go.
• Encourage people to check-in on Swarm and Foursquare. By offering promotions on Yelp for check-ins on other apps, you can recruit people to check in and notify their friends that they’ve been to your business. This ripple effect will encourage more people to do the same in future.

6) Utilize The Metrics From The Yelp Dashboard

The Yelp Dashboard also gives you free access to detailed metrics about your business’ performance on Yelp.

This enables you to track the traffic to your yelp profile, how often it has showed up in search results on the app, and tells you what “User Actionsâ€x9D have been taken, so you know how people engage with your business.

This information is accurate down to not just the day, but the time of day. It will help inform your decisions on other actions within your business, helping you decide when business needs a boost from a happy hour or specials menu.

In the 21st century, business strategies have to be based on data. Having a great source of free data is something to get excited about.

7) Scout Out Your Competition

Because so many businesses have a profile on Yelp, it’s a rich source of best practice information. If you’re just getting started, you can look to the competition for cues on what to do to maximize your impact.

Search Yelp for direct local competitors, and read their profiles carefully. In particular, spend your time identifying those with 4+ star ratings, and those with below a 3. This will give you an easy way to contrast the profiles, see what the great businesses are doing right and what the bad businesses are getting wrong.

Do their photos set them apart? Does their website link lead to an impressive site, or one that turns traffic away? Are their profiles keyword rich and well written, or simply a string of keywords with no useful information?

Answering these questions, identifying the strengths and weaknesses, and taking action based on this information will help your profile perform to the best of its ability.

8) Yelp Elite Membership

Yelp is a community that encourages engagement. They want Yelp to be an identity, not just an app. As such, the app has Elite members who get special perks.

Elite Members get access to regional parties, profile badges, snazzy profile covers on the mobile application, and a sense of power akin to the social media influencers on Instagram.

You can sniff out how active these people are in your community, as well as where they are active. You can use this to encourage these people to come to your business. Their review will go a lot further than an average member’s.

In case you were wondering, the secret formula to become a Yelp Elite goes a little something like this:

Snazzy profile photo.
Just like any other profile, having a fun, engaging and high quality profile picture will naturally make you better respected in the future.

Lists of places you’ve reviewed.
This allows people to see how engaged you are in the community, and if they like your style, makes it easier to take your recommendations in future as well.

Bookmark notable establishments.
By showing that you keep tabs on places, you prove you’re in for the long haul.

Take useful photos of an establishment when you leave a review.
Augmenting reviews with pictures is a great way to show you’ve put in extra effort.

Check-ins.
By checking in, the Yelp admin team can tell you what you’re up to. While you’re at it, answer useful questions like “Is there bike parking nearby?” so you actively help other members.

Talk.
Try to be engaging in any way you can. Respond to other people’s reviews, post updates and insights, recommend events and more. Remember Yelp’s aim is to be a community, so community spirit should inform whatever you do.

Events.
That reminds me, you can actually schedule events on Yelp’s public event calendar, either as a host or just to help raise awareness.

Tips.
Provide food recommendations, suggest the best time to visit certain locations. This added value engagement, based on expert insights, will help you establish yourself as an authority.

Import Friends.
You can invite people to sign up to Yelp using your email or social media accounts. By actively recruiting, you’re sure to establish your reputation as an influencer.

Quantity and Quality.
Leave more reviews, make sure they are quality. Keeping regularly updated will mean the Yelp team can count on you to respond well to Elite events.

If you want to, you can nominate yourself on the Yelp website. A community Manager will approve or disapprove based on your activity. If all you want to do is identify these users, then you can do so by looking for the people taking these actions.

Conclusion

By now, you should have a clear understanding of why it’s important to get your business set up on Yelp. It’ll provide an important source of SEO that can complement a well-optimized website (we have a tutorial on seo for small business, too). Both these things will help you draw more customers to your business.

As your ranking increases on Yelp, which happens as a consequence of getting both a lot of reviews and high-rated reviews, people will get to know your business and visit your website.

This will help a lot in local SEO, especially when people look for simple terms like, “where’s the best steak in town?â€x9D

It’s worth pointing out at this point that Siri uses Yelp to help inform local searches.

This means anyone with an iPhone could potentially be your next customer.

A few things to remember:

1. Ensure your NAP listings remain consistently across the web. If you have different addresses, opening times or contact details anywhere, you’re going to miss out on some customers and confuse even more. Bad plan.
2. Generate genuine reviews from customers on Google and Yelp. It may be tempting to quickly establish a reputation by paying for reviews or getting family and friends to write them for you. Don’t. Do things the right way and the rewards will be great. Cheat and you will be punished, and could set yourself back even further.
3. Optimize your website with targeted keywords. You need to do this before you look at establishing your presences on social media. The whole idea is to funnel people toward your site, so if it isn’t ready, you’re doing things in the wrong order.

So, over to you! Has your business found success from its presence on Yelp? Are you a Yelp member, and if so, what do you look for in business profiles that can help our readers succeed with you?

Updated: 24 January 2021

How To Rank Your Google Places/My Business Page

Are you wondering how to rank your Google Maps/Places/My Business page? Great, we get asked this question a lot.

This post is step one, it will help you just to get ranked. Once you are ranked, you will likely need to improve your rankings. If you feel your page is already properly optimized, read this post on five ways to improve your Places page rankings.

That will give you five simple tips on how to out rank your competition. If you don’t have a My Business page setup or are not the manager/owner of the page, this post is for you so read on.

Another Way to Rank

SEO is the process of getting your website listed in the search results.

But there is another way to rank in the search results.

There’s always another way in fact.

You see, last week I wrote a post on how to rank high in Google. That was shortsighted. Depending on what business or industry you’re in, there might be another way to have your website and business rank high.

Start by Googling your business, but don’t Google your business name. Instead, pretend you’re a new customer searching for one or all of your products and services.

Do you see search results that look like this?

Google My Business Pages

In the above image you see two organic search results, and then a map with 7 businesses listed and Google Map icons. These map-type results are known as Google Places or My Business Pages.

As of December 2015, these types of search results are showing up for just about every local search term. By that I mean if you search a product or service and your city name, you’ll see Google Places/My Business pages with the map showing where they’re located. These search results are the exact same if someone were to search for businesses via Google maps.

This is part of Google’s latest algorithm Pigeon which is focused on user proximity. In many ways, Pigeon provides an easier way to rank at the top of Google. Instead of investing in local SEO to rank your website, you can follow the steps in this post and rank your My Business page.

And I’m going to tell you what it takes to get your business listed and ranked in the “A” position in a couple of paragraphs.

Benefits of Optimizing your Google Places Page

No matter what, I think it’s important now and in the future to claim and optimize your Google Places Page. On top of jumping to the top of the search rankings, it’ll also help potential clients:

• Visually see your location
• Find your contact details fast
• See your business hours
• Learn what others have to say about you (blog post coming up on how to get more reviews)
• Quickly find directions to your location
• See what your store looks like (since you can add photos and even videos)

Some of the other benefits of properly optimizing your page are:

• Links your website to your local page
• Increases your business’s exposure and search traffic
• You have full control over your business details and can edit them

Now that you know the benefits, let me show you how to claim, optimize and rank your Google Places page!

How to Rank a Google Places Page

Over the remainder of this blog post, you will learn how to rank your Google Places page.

Here is what you will need to do:

1. Find out if your business is listed already
2. Create your listing if it isn’t listed
3. Claim your listing if it is listed
4. Optimize your Places page
5. Get your business listed in directories
6. Get people to review your business

Is Your Business Already Listed?

If you already have a My Business Page and have access to it, jump down to the optimize section.

If you don’t know, the first step is to see if your business page is listed. Sign into your Google account. If you don’t have one, sign up for one as you should have Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and now Google My Business setup under your Google account.

Once you have signed up and logged in, go to Google My Business. From there you should see a button titled “Get Your Page”.

The following page will have this image.

Select the proper definition of your business. No matter what you select you will be asked to search to see if your business is already listed. If this is the case, go to the claiming your listing section.

Search for your business name in the box and click on the blue magnifying glass. If it is listed, it’ll show up and you’ll have to claim the listing which you can learn how to do here.

Create a New Listing

If your page wasn’t listed, you’ll have to set one up. After the search you’ll see this screen.

Click on the “Add Your Business” link and this page will appear. Enter all your business details, making sure they are consistent with what is listed across the web. Name, address and phone number are now very important since Google’s Pigeon algorithm hit worldwide in December of 2014.

Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Login

Once you are done you will be asked to confirm that you are authorized to act on behalf of the company. Click continue and you will be prompted to select yes to verify the listing. This will come in the form of a postcard from Google containing a pin # to confirm you are the owner. That takes around 2 weeks. In the meantime, you can still optimize the page so jump to the optimize section!

Claiming Your Listing

If your business showed up when you searched, click on the business name.

The next screen will ask you to confirm if you are the authorized owner. Click the box and hit yes. The next page is where you will be asked to continue and verify you are the owner. Google will send a postcard to the address. The postcard will contain a pin # and instructions on how to verify you’re the owner. You can still optimize your page for better rankings in the meantime.

Time to Optimize

Your Google My Business dashboard will look like this.

Hit the red edit button to properly optimize all the areas. I can’t stress enough the importance of consistent name, address and phone number when it comes to your business listings.

Business Name – Make sure it’s correct, current and your legal name. Do not try and add any keywords. Doing so will cause Google to flag your page since it doesn’t match up with sites like YellowPages.ca.

Address – Confirm that this is the same as what is on your website’s contact page. If you don’t have your address listed, you should for a ton of reasons outside of this one!

Contact Info – Make sure it’s the same phone number as listed on your website and in other directories like Yelp and YellowPages. Add your website and main email address as well.

Category – You can add up to five services you provide. This is where you will want to determine your five most popular services. You might only have one or two, but add those in.

Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Online

Business Hours – Keep in mind people don’t have to visit your website to find out your hours. They can see that on your page or when they search your business name, so fill them out properly.

Photos – Add as many photos as you can. They could be of your store front or of your friendly staff. Make the visitor feel comfortable with you before they’ve even set foot in your store. Be sure to name your photos for some of your keywords/search terms. If you are a plumber use “city name+state/province+plumber.jpg”.

Introduction – Write 250 words of unique content that is different from on your website. It’s been recommended by various local SEO’s that I connect with that you should avoid keyword stuffing or placing any keywords in your about section. List all of your popular services that people might search for in an easy to read way and put links to important pages on your site, your Better Business Bureau or perhaps Yelp pages for reviews.

Once this is done, hit the blue “Done Editing” button.

All Done But Now What?

In many cases, simply creating or claiming and optimizing your Google My Business page might get you ranked, but at the bottom of the Places listings. You want to be ranking at the top don’t you? Of course you do!

Improve Your Search Rank With Yelp And Google My Business Account

Read our article on five ways to improve your Google Places ranking. That will really improve your Places page rankings.

So I’ve covered a lot in this post on how to rank your Google My Business page. If you have any questions, you can contact us below and/or visit our Google My Business packages page. We have created a few packages and services aimed at helping you improve your rankings.

Until then, optimize!