I am a small business owner, and I want to recommend the following to ALL business owners:

1. NEVER PAY to advertise on Yelp, and
2. AVOID YELP at all costs if possible.

Google is a horrible company as well, but at least there are not bogus reviews of your company left on their sites for all eternity.

I am sure Yelp will be around for quite a while only because consumers ( especially the youngsters) are not clued in to the shenanigans committed by Yelp management and their employees.

For any consumers out there, if you are going to rely on Yelp, make sure you read the filtered reviews as well.

And if you want real feedback, use services like Angieslist or ask the contractor for references.

What we have noticed is that any favorable reviews on our services are filtered, especially if the customer only used Yelp to review our service.

Our customers want to provide feedback and because they are new to Yelp their feedback is filtered. On the other hand, out of the 2 negative reviews we have received, those never get filtered. We are also very suspicious about one of the reviews and believe it was a sales rep who we declined ( trying to sell us Yelp services.. DONT DO IT). We used Yelp and ironically our clickthrough was higher when we didnt use Yelp.

Customer service is horrible. When you ask for their assistance, you get a generic auto response. He is this company making millions off of small business but they have no one that can assist small business owners except via email, the quality of which is horrible. Somehow, however, they have the time to have sales reps hound you by phone.

I do believe that there is some sort of retribution on Yelp’s part for companies that decline their services. It seems that every positive review I have received after that conversation has been filtered within a matter of hours.

I encourage my customers to ask for references from me directly. We have thousands of very happy customers and we really do not need a service like Yelp.

All business owners should have a list of references for their customers no matter what type of business you are in.

Online reviews, especially bad ones are one sided and in some cases libelous and tend just to want to bash the business. There is no screening on Yelp’s part.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Yelp is a free service, ie customers do not have to pay to review a business. Consequently, you can have competitors reviewing you, and/or friend.family etc of your competitors.

There are better services to use if you want valid feedback from people. For services, one of those would be Angies List. We have never received a negative review on Angies List. Our customers know that we are approachable and if we have any issues we correct them. Our business is to make our customers satisfied. Why would anyone want angry customers?

It would be nice to see a paid service for restaurants that would compete with Yelp. Yelp has demonstrated in the past that it is capable of unethical business practices.

I’m not surprised because Google is far worse than Yelp. You should definitely read my post Google IS Evil.
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Internet Marketing: Where to Start (dofollow)

We have recently implemented a system to outsmart yelp from hiding our filtered reviews:

Step 1- first of all, if you’re advertising with yelp, stop doing so and shift that money to optimize your own web site instead

Step 2- have a graphic designer make a yelp badge that is placed on your web site. It should say “we have …… filtered and unfiltered reviews on yelp”. 

Step 3- when a visitor clicks on the badge, it will go to another page ON YOUR OWN WEB SITE (instead of going to yelp’s. (why help them get traffic and rank higher anyways)? 

Step 4- on this page have your graphic designer get a screen capture (picture) of all your filtered and unfiltered reviews and have them pasted together onto one page.

Now, all your reviews (filtered or not) will be visible to all your web site visitors. 

5- put a note on the top that says, “for your convenience we have placed all our filtered and unfiltered reviews on one page to see. If you’d like to go to our live yelp page, click here …………”

Make the whole page clickable to your live yelp page  so no-one will say you’re trying hide something or to be dishonest 

Advantages of doing this: 

1- your visitors will stay on your web site instead of being directed to yelp’s

2- your visitor can’t click on your competitors 

3- no more being a slave to yelp’s algorithm

4- yelp would not benefit from getting traffic from you and higher rankings on google 

5- this whole process cost us less than $150 to implement 

Just be sure to shift that $300 per month on yelp advertising and put it into KEYWORDS that people will search for. 

Please pass this along to everyone you know