Enter the world of Brand Reputation Management! Review sites like Yelp have made their mark with crowed-sourcing reviews on business, possibly YOUR business. Did you get bad reviews, good reviews, disgruntled employee reviews, brand-mobbing reviews?
Most people with businesses that have been Yelped are now understanding the power of peoples opinions; good or bad. From restaurants to doctors, plumbers to airlines, service providers to destinations, you are going to get Yelped and you better be ready to listen and learn.
With about 85% of my clients having Yelp reviews, almost all of them can gleam something from it. In almost all the cases, I have been able to show my clients how Yelp reviews can help grow their brand and change elements of their services if the negative issues are consistent. But there is a dark side of Yelp and it’s becoming more of a chore to those who are concerned with their online branding. But Yelp is not the only game in the online review spin.
I have had clients that have unjustly been targeted with bad ratings by everything from ex-employees to brand-swarming and it shows up poorly on search engines. On top of that, Yelp has a filter system that has no real sensible algorithm and aimlessly dumps good reviews out of the ratings system and visibility of the person searching. But are you a hostage to Yelp? Good news is NO!
There are programs that I have started for clients that use the same review tactics of Yelp but with other review sites like Google Map, City Search, Yahoo Directory, Urban Spoon, Yellow Pages and other review based sites. Now, I’m not going to give it away but I think I gave you enough to let your creativity start. You might not be able to push Yelp reviews out of your top ten in searches, but you can push them down.
If you search your brand and there is only Yelp reviews, encourage your brand loyalists to review on other directory sites. That’s more ratings for you in results and at the end of the day, it’s competition for Yelp on positioning during search results!
