How do yelp ratings work

Send out the invite to Yelpers who have already visited your business, or those who have reviewed a business similar to your own. Try a raffle to win dinner with a friend, a free reusable water bottle, whatever!

Make it fun and exciting for attendees! Post a Yelp Deal: Yelp Deals are a great way to get customers in the door. Unlike with Groupon or Living Social, customers who take advantage of a Yelp Deal are pretty much guaranteed to be active Yelp users, increasingly the likelihood of them writing you a review. Add Happy Staff Photos: Friendly, smiling, waving staff members being featured on your Yelp page will create a positive first impression for your Yelp page visitors, and might even discourage disgruntled customers from posting something nasty.

Offer Foursquare Check-in Rewards: Foursquare has long passed its heyday as an ultra-popular location check-in tool, but a lot of awesome folks such as your truly still use it to broadcast micromanaged location updates for our undying fans. Even a small Foursquare award, like free drinks for the mayor, can get users excited.

After all, who is using Foursquare except for the media-obsessed foodie-photographing weirdos? People like to be acknowledged, and responding to Yelp reviews creates a favorable impression for your business, and shows readers that you care about your customers. Add a Yelp QR Code: Yelp QR codes are a simple way to make it easier for your smartphone-carrying patrons to check out your Yelp page and review you in-store!

Reminding them to write about you on Yelp is a surefire way to get some positive reviews. Add a Yelp Website Badge: A Yelp website badge lets visitors know you are on Yelp, and all they have to do is click the badge to be taken straight to your Yelp page. Be Awesome: If you provide excellent food, excellent service, and an excellent experience, you will get great Yelp reviews, no question about it. Be the best you can be and the glowing reviews will follow! Offer Bribes for Reviews: Yelp is very strict in regards to their reviews policy.

You absolutely cannot and should not offer a reward in exchange for a review. Just know for now that buying Yelp reviews is not worth the trouble by a long shot.

Even great businesses get some negative reviews on Yelp from time to time. It sucks. Sometimes businesses mess up and deserve to be called out. Other times a bad review can feel completely undeserved. Instead of responding in a flurry of keystrokes, take a deep breath, brew a cup of tea, and get your mind off the review.

Try to read the negative Yelp review objectively — is there any sense to what the Yelper is saying? Does the review seem worked up and emotional?

Public or Private Response? While public responses are good for correcting discrepancies, consider whether or not a discreet private message could remedy the situation. Yelp has a feature that allows business owners to respond to negative reviews. The key is to remain calm and take the high road. Above all, remain polite and respectful. Those who bypass step one end up responding to negative reviews in an angry, emotional state which can lead to name-calling, insults, and emotional language that makes you look as terrible and unstable as the reviewer, or more so.

Your goal in responding to the reviewer is to discredit their assessment. For example:. There are also things you can ask your customers to do to create the type of profile that would not get filtered. If Yelp is trying to filter reviews from not real people as spam, help your customers through the filter by instructing them to complete their profile and start leaving reviews regularly.

Ask them to invest in creating a real Yelp footprint — and get the benefit of the leading local review site. I have left over reviews, have over 50 friends and I have a realistic review distribution between 1 and 5 stars.

As a result, not only do my reviews never get filtered, but even better, my Yelp reviews always appear on the front page. This is because I am real. I have left real, useful reviews to businesses I frequent and look like a real person to Yelp. Ten minutes twice a week should give you a good profile in weeks and then you are off to the races and should be in good standing with the Yelp Review Filter.

If you keep it up for a prolonged period, you might even be invited to join their coveted Yelp Elite Squad. The line here is blurry. Confusing, right? If someone is following you on email, Twitter or Facebook, they probably like what you are doing. But never, ever pay for positive Yelp reviews because if they catch you, you will feel their wrath.

No one wants be labeled a Yelp Review Cheater and this is what they will see:. There are those who might read this post and think that you can use the guidance above to create a team of positive Yelp reviewers that get through the Yelp filter and can be used for good and evil.

They have advanced algorithms to see who is trying to cheat the Yelp Review Filter. Nothing beats creating a sustainable program to have your customers turn positive experiences into positive Yelp reviews — even if many of them get caught in the Yelp Review Filter. Most of all, recognize that positive Yelp reviews come from great experiences. The more you have, the better off you will be, Yelp Review Filter notwithstanding. If you create a positive experience for a person, you might be surprised how many will try to help you as a small business owner.

And every review that is left for you is an opportunity to engage a customer or prospect, driving business and ultimately better reviews. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Why is the review above written by a user with 52 friends and 5 reviews filtered out, while the one below makes the cut? I decided to try and find out. There is a key limiting factor in any analysis of visible versus filtered reviews—you cannot look at the user profile of someone whose review is not recommended.

If we knew exactly how it worked, then we could game it. A good way to get around this is to send a follow-up email to the customer a few days after you assist them, asking them how their experience was, and to leave a review for you if their experience was positive.

If you hold a day-long promotion during which you offer customers some sort of deal if they leave a positive review for your business on Yelp, what Yelp is going to see is that a business which had previously received only a handful of reviews over several years is suddenly getting multiple reviews on the same day.

If you insist on having some sort of promotion, spread it out over time. Make it part of your standard follow-up communication, as suggested above, rather than some sort of special event that immediately puts Yelp on high alert.

But based on experienced, we can infer that the above is true. I opted to choose five random businesses in the local Sacramento area: a restaurant, auto repair shop, plumber, clothing shop, and golf course. I would collect this data for each and every visible and filtered review for these five businesses, and see if the comparisons made anything clear.

Now, there is a complicating factor for any comparison of Yelp reviews. In a phrase: power users. While many Yelp users are very low-key, only leaving a small handful of reviews, instead primarily using the service to view reviews left by other users. But there is a small a coalition of super users who contribute a LOT of reviews to Yelp.

For instance, one business I looked at had 33 reviews. When I took a look at how many photos each user had previous submitted to Yelp, I found that while most users had contributed zero or very few photos, one user had submitted 9, photos to Yelp. This presents a serious problem. They completely wreck the grading curve. With this in mind, for all other variables besides Yelp rating, I chose to use the median average.

For our purposes, a median is really useful because it gives us a number where half the users in a group fell below that number, and half of the users are above it. The median is the proverbial C student, smack in the middle of the demographic.