SEO Tips for Ranking on Yelp?

[Alchemist23]

There's a lot of information floating around about best practices for ranking on Google Local, but not much information about ranking on Yelp.  I wanted to see if anyone has suggestions about ranking for Yelp or if you can point me towards some information that would be great.

[stevefidelity]

I'm assuming you're referring to ranking when someone searches on Yelp as opposed to getting your Yelp profile to rank in the SERPs.

There's not a whole lot of literature/research out their on this topic, but just from experiencing working with clients to claim/complete their Yelp listings, I feel I can speak to it to a certain extent...

One of the more obvious things is having a listing that has content on it. It's not in Yelp's best interest for people to do a search for restaurants only to find a list of restaurants with their names, addresses & phone numbers. So first thing would be claiming your profile and completing the full profile. I don't want to suggest that if you don't have a 'completely full' profile, that's going to hurt your chances, but it can't hurt. Obviously with Yelp, reviews are huge. So you want to encourage real people/real customers to write reviews for you online. However, you've gotta be mindful of the fact that Yelp does a very good job of filtering reviews. So if you tell a customer to write a review on Yelp, and they go sign up for an account, write a review right away, and then never come back to Yelp - that review's gonna disappear.

If Yelp sees a steady flow of reviews, particularly coming from active members of their community, that's most definitely going to help.

The reviews for Yelp are much more crucial than they are for Google. Yelp will sooner show the user businesses with reviews that aren't geographically relevant, than they will show geographically relevant businesses with no reviews & no info on their profiles.

One specific tool that can be useful in terms of driving users to your Yelp profile to write reviews is the Bright Local Review Biz badge. 

[WilliamCarr]

To add to this, I think a huge mistake businesses make is the just cut and paste content from their website to fill out their Yelp page. This is duplicate content! Write something original and ask them to take action (call or click to your website).

[Alchemist23]

Yeah, I've already done those things.  Yelp is huge for my business.  The trafic to my website is nearly 50/50 split between Google and Yelp.  It seems like there would be more reasearch and documentation on Yelp since it's such a relevant search platform.

I've basically been following the same best practices for setting up my Google Local account as the Yelp account.

[Alchemist23]

Does anyone else have any ideas?

[DavidChevalier]

You've probably checked out Yelp's FAQ, Terms of Service and Content Guidelines.

If you have, you've discovered the following associated problems with your question:

• Yelp believes the best reviews aren't solicited
• Yelp doesn't even want you asking for reviews
• Yelp admits its automated filter is imperfect

They just want you to fill out your profile, provide great customer service, respond to reviews and put Yelp decals, logos and buttons to create awareness for Yelp (and your listing on Yelp). If their advice works, that's the safest approach.

They know their filter is imperfect and therefore unfair but they don't want you to get impatient with them and work to have direct influence. Naturally, Yelp wants to be the arbiter of the Yelp experience.

You might want to consider carefully asking for some reviews (but definitely never pay for them). Steve Gould is right that Yelp favors active Yelpers.  You might try asking people how they found out about you, and if say they came from Yelp, you know they are an active user - so intelligently ask them for a review.