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‍Is Yelp Advertising Right for Your Business?

Digital Advertising

Yelp provides tremendous value to business owners, helping you attract new customers who are interested in what you have to offer. In this article, our experts at local SEO in Miami will provide you with an assessment of Yelp's advertising platform.

This should help you make more informed decisions about whether to advertise on Yelp. Our ultimate goal is to help you understand where to spend your company's digital advertising budget to maximize your return on investment.

What Is Yelp?

Launched in 2004, Yelp is a well-known internet directory for consumers looking for local businesses such as pubs, restaurants, cafés, service providers, and many others.

How Does Yelp Work?

Users access Yelp via its website or app. Then, they enter a search term to find listings for a specific kind of business in their area. Listings are primarily categorized by company type.   

From there, the results are further refined by:

  • Geographical Area
  • Price Range
  • Distinguishing Features (e.g., outdoor seating, delivery service, and the ability to take reservations)

Yelp has a vital social component. It encourages users to leave written reviews, star ratings, and photos of their interactions with each business they visit.

Each Yelp account comes with a friends list that can be expanded by connecting the app to Facebook, or by connecting the address book to a smartphone or tablet. Other users can rate Yelp reviews, and prominent reviewers can be promoted to Yelp Elite status.

Yelp Advertising Options

Businesses can purchase two types of premium features from Yelp:

  • Business Page Upgrades
  • Yelp Ads

Business Page Upgrades

Yelp's business page upgrade homepage
Photo from Yelp

Business Page Upgrades are premium features for your Yelp profile that improve the look of your Yelp profile page. Upgrades are categorized as follows:

  • Restriction of Competitors' Ads
  • Enhanced Slideshow
  • Yelp Call-to-Action (CTA)

A free Yelp profile displays rival adverts on the profile. If you advertise on Yelp, your business will appear on the Yelp profile of your competition and a lot of other profiles. If you pay to restrict your competitors' advertisements, your profile will be ad-free from your competitors and others.

The enhanced slideshow allows you to display photographs in your preferred order.

The Yelp Call to Action feature allows you to put a Call to Action on your Yelp profile. Visitors who click your Call to Action might be sent to a discount, order form, or other page.

Yelp Ads

Yelp ads homepage
Photo from Yelp

Yelp Ads is a paid feature that promotes your business in search results and business listings. It works similarly to Google Ads and Facebook Ads in that business owners can pay to obtain preferential results and placements.

Depending on the website where the advertisement appears, it will usually reveal the following:

  • Company Logo
  • Service Area
  • Customer Feedback
  • Call-to-action (CTA) Button
  • Star Rating

When you sign up for advertising, you can expect to:

  • Target potential customers as they select where to spend their money with these adverts.
  • See your ads on the profiles of your rivals and other businesses.
  • Receive historical stats to see how your campaign is doing.

Simply put, it's similar to what you'd see in the "organic" section of a Yelp search, but it has the yellow "AD" button.

How Can Yelp Advertising Help Your Business?

It makes sense that Yelp is a fantastic ads platform. As a business, your goal is to reach out to people who are looking for your product or service. Yelp's entire existence is dependent on people searching for a service.

Through advertisements displayed on rival sites and in search, Yelp advertising will reach a large audience that is loosely tailored to your industry.  

What Are the Benefits of Yelp Advertising?

1. You're reaching out to people who are ready to buy.

When people prepare to buy something, one of the last things they do is research other people's experiences. This implies that people use Yelp to determine whether the value of doing business with a specific company meets their future expectations.

When the reviews are primarily positive, Yelp can help a company seal the deal.

2. Paid advertising on Yelp is a huge benefit.

Yelp will typically show just one to two advertisements per user search. That's even if there's advertising in place that targets the search terms input. For many companies competing for high-ranking keywords, Yelp provides a chance to be recognized at a local level that may not be accessible via other online paid marketing choices.

3. Customers can purchase services straight from Yelp.

Yelp offers introductory pricing for online purchases, including a 12.5 percent fee and credit card processing for each transaction.

Your company keeps track of all tips and taxes, and this system is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with free live assistance.

What Are The Drawbacks Of Yelp Advertising?

1. A paid Yelp presence requires a long-term commitment.

Yelp often requires companies on their site to sign a one-year contract. Although this is more of an expectation than a policy, deciding to discontinue a paid presence before the 12-month period is over can prove difficult.

2. Businesses must pay for an improved listing to run ads.

Improved Yelp listings are prohibitively expensive for some small businesses.

Yelp Connect — which allows you to create posts, customize your listing's newsfeed, and connect with potential customers — costs $99/month as of October 2020.

On the other hand, Yelp Ads range in price from $150 to $750 per month and enable you to create targeted ads that appear on relevant Yelp results pages.

3. You have no influence over the reviews that are shown.

Yelp permits business owners to reply to reviews. Still, unless the review violates the site's terms of service, there is nothing a company owner can do to delete ratings that seem to be fake.

Even with active answers, wrong information might sway future consumers due to the 5-star rating system in place. It just takes one bad one-star review to cancel out a slew of positive ones.

Is Yelp Advertising a Good Investment?

Digital Marketer "approved"

If you already have a Yelp profile and have had success with your free account, you may be able to succeed with Yelp Advertising. Our experts at local SEO in Miami encourage you to create a Yelp profile if you haven't already.

Trust us when we say it's worthwhile to set up a free Yelp profile!

People look at Yelp to see what previous customers have said about you. Potential customers are curious about the experiences of your previous customers.

Even with Yelp advertising, customers still look for reviews to determine the best business. As a result, if your profile isn't established, you're unlikely to progress.

Let The Experts Run Your Yelp Ads For You

If you're interested in setting up Yelp ads for your small business but don't know where to start, or if you're already running Yelp ads but aren’t sure how to assess the results you're getting from that investment made, you've come to the right place.

At Digital Resource, our experts at Local SEO in Miami specializes in digital marketing for small companies, including internet directories such as Yelp.

We can help you navigate Yelp's paid and organic aspects and gain the newest clients.

Contact us today to learn how we've helped other businesses with their Yelp Ad Campaigns and how we can do the same for you.

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