Have you been a victim of Yelp’s latest recommendation software upgrade? Have you lost a large percentage of your reviews on your Yelp page? If so, we’re here to give you the tips on how to get those reviews back and how to move forward!
For those who don’t know, Yelp is a website that serves as a listing for businesses. Customers can post reviews and give ratings – companies will then pay for ads so that they come up first in search results. Before yelp introduced this new system upgrade, all reviews and ratings were posted at the top of the page so customers could easily interact. However, as of late, Yelp’s most recent update has been placing 70-80% of successful businesses’ reviews at the bottom of their page under a section titled: “not recommended.” They quickly earned the title “Ghost” because businesses’ reviews were going “invisible” so to speak.
The purge has affected various businesses’, some that have been in business for over 20 years. The thing with Yelp is only the “recommended reviews” count towards your ratings or “stars” so to speak. Although the algorithm used to weed out fake reviews works sometimes, it is removing reviews that are real and helpful to these businesses. As a business this is an issue that you want solved right away. Of course, many people rely on these reviews for customer’s to learn about them and if they are all disappearing they in turn lose business.
Yelp has received various complaints on the matter – some that even go as far as wanting to cancel their advertising with Yelp because it is causing more damage than good. Yelp isn’t the only company out there providing listing for businesses’ and with competition like Google, Facebook, and ANGI, they need to make some changes fast. To understand what measures to take we wanted to know exactly what was happening with “Ghost.” According to searchengineland.com, the update began around October of 2018, users reviews are being removed and/or moved to the not recommended section, and 1 in 4 Yelp accounts that were monitored were losing reviews. Some businesses’ lost enough reviews to lose a full star rating.
WHAT TO DO
We have the scoop for you and we are here to help you out! First, take a deep breath in and know that your business will continue to succeed with or without Yelp reviews. Second, there are some add-ons you can incorporate on your Yelp to make your page seem more interactive. By adding these, it shows Yelp your reviews are active and that you’re interacting with your customers. Paying attention to your Yelp page as much as your customers do is of the utmost importance. Yelp wants to see that you are interacting with your customers and keeping the page up to date. If you have any promos or offers, sharing them on Yelp will increase your visibility as well as attract more people to your page.
Let’s face it: who doesn’t love a coupon or promotion with just a click of a button. Our number one tip is to stay engaged and show Yelp that you are being consistent with your customers and keeping that open conversation with them. Taking on a business strategy instead of worrying without a plan is obviously the way to go moving forward! So create your plan and get interacting!!
Another great tip is to add a section for reviews on your website. This is a great way to be able to monitor and track your reviews individually instead of going through a third source. If you wish to do this please note that you will have both types of reviews showing up on your page that you might not want. Although negative reviews are part of the job, it might not be in best practice to have them filtered on your website.
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