Why you should (not) advertise on Yelp

I’ve been looking at local search for a while now, being listed in Google places has helped my business tremendously by being ranked well in a Google organic search results, so much so that my business is a favorite place on Google. (I got the fancy QR code sticker and everything.) In the last few months I have been studying other local search such as foursquare and yelp. I have been asking experts in the photography field about how local search affects photographers online and had an interview with Rosh Sillars, co-author of “The Linked Photographer’s guide” on his podcast the new media photographer. Yesterday I got a call from a very kind and knowledgeable sales rep from Yelp and I had a long phone call with him this morning. I learned a lot about Yelp and thought I’d share it here.

the free business profile on Yelp

Yelp’s business listings let your customers write reviews about your business and also give you a chance to add some basic information about your business, similar to a profile on Google local. It includes your address, contact info, link to your website, map of the business location, room for a special offer, your opening hours, some options for sharing this listing and writing a review and a space for an add of your competitor (more on that later).

Below the fold your business listing continues with your reviews and some more information about your specialities, your businesses history and a brief bio of you the business owner.

All this information can be entered by you on Yelp, where all you need to have is a personal profile in order to claim your business listing (or to write a review for that matter). Once you claim your business, Yelp verifies your information with an automatic phone call that prompts you to enter a code.

The organic search algorithm in Yelp is based on a couple of factors, reviews, completeness of listing, age of listing (I assume all this – since it’s secret), but it also takes into account the reviewer. When I do a search for photographer in Miami there are listings that have higher rankings, although they have less and worse reviews, but the reviewer is a top reviewer on Yelp with many reviews.

Yelp provides a lot of information about the reviewer how many reviews, how many 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, … reviews how many reviews of what type of businesses (‘x’ number of restaurants, ‘y’ number of bars, ‘z’ number of hotels) and it seems that if you have a person that writes a lot of reviews on Yelp reviews your business that this pushes that business listing to the top of the pile – even if the reviews are not good. For instance, my company – at this point I have 2 5-star reviews came in behind 2 3-start reviewed businesses – although one of the companies had only one review, but the reviewer had written many reviews on Yelp. Yelp also does not seem to be able to differentiate on what was reviewed, so if an expert reviewer that has 500 restaurant reviews for instance (and would arguably be an expert on reviewing restaurants) – if that person reviews my photography business, and that review is the only photography related review, it would rank higher than a listing that is reviewed by photography experts that have not reviewed an aggregate of 500 businesses, although their opinion should carry more weight.

However Yelp also has another method of advertising:

the paid business profile on yelp

Yelp has a paid advertising program, that has a lot of benefits over their normal business listing. Let’s start with the Search Page Ad. The business listing with the yellow background is the sponsored result. Yelp places this on top of the search when people search for related topics, Yelp says this is not keyword driven, but more concept driven, i.E. this listing for a photographer would pop up when someone is looking for photos, photography, images, …

So is it worth the money?

This specific program is based on impressions (the Yelp rep guaranteed me 500+ impressions a month, for roughly ¢70 per impression.) – There is a PPC version available as well, but it is limited to 10 clicks a day for $2.- per click. It does not give you the enhanced business listing.

The second benefit of a paid listing is that your listing is placed in your competitors ad (again see the sponsored yellow link inside the Business Page Ad of another photographer – see I told you we were coming back to the competitors ad in your business profile). At the same time paying for this program guarantees that no competitor ads will pop up in your listing.

Finally you can track your profile views on your business owner’s account page (which looks very similar to the information I get with the un paid version of my Yelp account).

The last big thing difference you get for this paid program is the Enhanced Business Listing. This listing features a slide show with unlimited photos, where the first image is actually a video that is produced by TurnHere.com, a web service that comes to your place of business and produces a 60-90 sec video – actually a pretty cool concept.

my conclusion

I like Yelp. I like the concept. I like the interface. I like the reviews. I like the fact that real people write real reviews – at least that what Yelp is trying to do.

But so far all of my SEO efforts have centered on organic search. I have played with Google adwords for a month with not a single sale and I have done some paid facebook advertising without any success either, whereas my organic (can you say free) SEO efforts have paid off immensely – Photography by Depuhl is a ‘Favorite Place on Google‘ for instance, so I need to confess that I am a little gun shy about paid search. Going from a $0.- search budget to one that would cost several thousand dollars is a little steep for me right now.

However, this paid search on Yelp has some really good benefits, I like the idea of the professionally produced video they throw in – that’s pretty sweet (but also something I can do my self with a couple photographer buddies of mine), I like the enhanced listings, but not enough to pay that kind of money for this. I also like the fact that you pop up in your competition’s profile as an ad – although I almost always completely ignore sponsored results in a search result.

Today I don’t think my target  market (companies that are looking for a commercial photographer in Miami) are looking for that on Yelp. In the future I think that Yelp is definitely a valid resource to be listed on and I like where the company is headed (so does Google, they tried to buy out Yelp  for $500 million but where turned down in late Dec. 2009 according to the New York Times blog).

My biggest issue is the lack of metrics. Sure Yelp says that 1,000 people were looking for photography in Miami last month, but I would assume that most of those are looking for shooters for their weddings, portraits and events. But I can’t see that, I have to take their word for it. They also guarantee me 500+ impressions – and though I can see them on my business owner’s account page, they are very rudimentary from what they look like to me. Since it is not keyword based search on the users part, I don’t know when Yelp would serve up my listing – if someone is looking to buy a camera or for a place to have photographic prints made, will I be listed and counted as an impression?

So the long and short of it is that for me the cost of this profile (although it comes with some really nice features and exclusivity) is too steep. My concern is that my target market is not using Yelp (yet) and I would like to see some better metrics for knowing who is searching for what on Yelp and how my ads would get served up.

That being said, if you want to give me the money, I would love to try this out for a year (Yelp’s timeframe one has to commit to for the sponsored listings) and I promise to report back on it in a year. But for now I can’t justify the expense and the PPC program does not seem to give me good enough benefits – although I may try it on for size. Who knows maybe it will convince me to give Yelp a try with the sponsored profile.