Savvy small business owners know that a carefully designed website is key to bringing in new customers. However, even those potential buyers who are impressed with a well-designed website will still check sites like Yelp to make sure that a business can backup their artful internet presence with quality service. This makes Yelp just as important to the health of your company as your own website. As a business owner, you used to have less control over what your business looked like on Yelp — until now.
Yelp just debuted a smorgasbord of new ad products that give every small business owner control over their presentation on the world’s most popular review site. Yelp gathered data from thousands of listings across the entire country and used it to develop tools that enable the kind of best practices that will help every business grow. And right now, they’re offering business owners that want to take advantage of these features $300 in Yelp Ads to get started.
Claim Your Page
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The first step for any business is to claim their page, a free service offered by Yelp. Yelp’s data shows that owners who claim their Yelp listing see twice as much engagement from potential customers as those who don’t.
Up Your Image Game
Next, make sure the images on Yelp reflect the quality of the food that comes out of the kitchen or the goods on the shelves. According to Yelp’s data points, professional photos increase page visits threefold, and once a listing has been claimed, any business owner can upload these for free.
To control the order that a potential customer sees the images (i.e. make sure they see professional pics before some overexposed camera phone image that a random patron carelessly uploaded), upgrade to Yelp’s paid feature called Slideshow.
A similarly image-focused feature called Portfolio is designed for any type of contractor (house painter, carpet cleaner, etc.) to show off images of actual projects they’ve completed, for $2/day.
Verify Your Services
For $1/day, contractors as well as babysitters, plumbers, and healthcare providers can opt into the Verified License program. Yelp will independently validate any trade licenses a company uses and adds a badge to the listing so that any potential customers they’re looking at a trustworthy expert.
Enhance Your Profile
These features shared above ensure key details from a business’s website are highlighted on the Yelp listing, but you won’t get the real feeling of a curated page without the best of Yelp’s new ad products: the Enhanced Profile. For $90/month, Yelp will allow photo and video customization, removal of competitor ads, and a custom call-to-action button. These upgrades from a random Yelp listing to a site on par with a business’s own website are shown to increase customer leads by 38%, making this program invaluable for anyone trying to grow their business.
Highlight Your Business
When people are searching within Yelp, you want to ensure that they consider your business even if they’ve never heard it. The Business Highlights feature allows you to choose up to six key products or services you want to highlight. These will then show up above reviews on your profile page and the top two selections will show up in Yelp search results, helping you stand out with your best value front and center.
If you’re a business owner who hasn’t given their Yelp page the time and attention it deserves, now’s the perfect time to start with their $300 Yelp Ads offer.
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