How to Master Yelp Advertising for Home Service Businesses
23 Jun, 2020 / Comments: Comments Off on How to Master Yelp Advertising for Home Service Businesses / By Stuart McHenry
We work with home service businesses like plumbers, HVAC, electrical, roofing, and house cleaning. There is a vast divide when you ask these small business owners about Yelp advertising. You generally get one of two answers:
1. They hate Yelp and don’t recommend it
2. They love Yelp, and it brings in a bunch of leads
If you own or manage a company in the home services industry, Yelp is a must. If a homeowner needs a plumber, they may search one of a few places. While Google is essential and can bring in lots of traffic, Yelp should not be ignored.
Most of the business owners that hate Yelp don’t understand how to get quality leads from the service.
Homeowners love using Yelp because they can see real reviews of the business they are looking to hire. Yelp is strict regarding its review policy, and they filter out more reviews than any other platform. This can be good and bad for business owners.
Yelp will filter out reviews for the following reasons:
• Fake Reviews
• Out of Service Area
• New User Account
• Duplicate IP Address
• Too Positive
• Too Negative
• Violation of the Yelp TOS
It can be frustrating, but some legit reviews will get filtered out for any of the above reasons.
It happens, and you will want to pull your hair out and yell at your computer. My advice is don’t take it too hard and don’t harp on it.
Yelp reviews will pop-in and pop-out from time-to-time. One day you can have 85 reviews, and the next day 6 or 7 could get filtered, and you are down to 78 reviews. Then next week, you are right back up in the ’80s with no new reviews. It happens.
Tip: You can contact the users that have filtered reviews and explain why they may be filtered out. If they add a profile picture, add some friends on the platform, and review more businesses, the filtered reviews will pop back. It might take a week, but this usually works.
How to Succeed with Yelp Advertising
Getting Reviews
If you have no reviews advertising on Yelp will provide little to no ROI. It would help if you had some good reviews, so when a potential customer is comparing your business to one of your competitors, you give your business a chance.
Would you hire a company with no reviews? Or a 1-star or 2-star rating? Probably not unless you were desperate.
If you have no reviews, work on getting them. Although with Yelp, there is a catch 22. It is against Yelp’s terms of service to ask customers for reviews. So how can you get reviews then?
This might sound like a cliché, but the best way to get reviews is by providing outstanding service. If your company can knock the socks off a few customers a day, you will get your reviews in no time. Once you get a few reviews under your belt, your ROI in Yelp advertising will be much higher.
Fast Response & Replies
If you take anything away from this article, this is the section to take. Most business owners that hate Yelp PPC advertising fail to respond to customers promptly. Your digital communication should be treated like your phone calls. You probably answer your phones quickly or have an answering service that does this for you.
Would you let your phone ring for two hours straight before answering it?
No, and when you get a message from a Yelp user, asking about your services, you must respond right away. If you don’t, another company will, and the Yelp user will most likely book an appointment with your competitor.
Tip: Create an instant reply script to start the conversation with Yelp users. Save it on your computer and copy and paste it to your new Yelp messages. It can be something simple like this below:
Hello,
We can help you with that!
We provide free estimates, and I can book an appointment for you. One of our
technicians will come out to your location and provide a proper free estimate.
You can reply here or call us at (951) 555-1212 to book an appointment.
Thanks,
Stuart M.
Sunshine Plumbing Company
(951) 555-1212
Competing with Multiple Requests
I cannot stress this enough. If you reply fast, you will increase the number of calls you book off of Yelp. Many of the requests from Yelp go to companies that have ads running the same time as yours. If someone is looking for a plumber, the request may go to 4-5 plumbing companies at the same time. If you wait a few hours to reply, the customer may already have their problem fixed by then.
Maintain Your Star Rating
If you have below a 4-star rating, it will be an uphill battle. Not impossible but challenging. Remember, you are competing against all the other companies in your area that are advertising on Yelp. And you can bet that many of them have 4.5-5.0 stars.
Ensure your technicians are consistent and are providing outstanding service on every call. No matter what you do, if you run enough service calls, you will eventually let a customer down. Technicians have off days where they drop the ball, it happens. If you get enough excellent reviews, the few bad reviews won’t matter as much.
Dealing with Bad Reviews on Yelp
When you get a bad review on Yelp, don’t panic. Most of the time, if you respond fast enough, you can turn that review around. When a customer leaves a bad review, they are usually expecting the company to get back to them and correct the situation.
At this point, I would go out of my way to show that customer what 5-star service looks like. In many cases, if you respond quickly and rectify the situation, many customers will then update their review.
Recapping Yelp’s Advertising Platform
Most business owners except to throw money at Yelp and leads start flying in. It doesn’t work that way. Once you are in a position to start the PPC advertising, you still need to fight for the customers. The companies we work within the home services industry can see from a three to seven-time ROI.
If you have any questions about Yelp or would like to inquire about our Yelp advertising management service, please contact us.
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