There are many articles online about why Yelp sucks:
Even our own reader Patrick expressed why he feels Yelp is bad for business on our post about how to get more Yelp reviews:
Jun,
[You] did a big disservice to small business by asking them to suport YELP. Yelp is bad for [the] business community and any effort to support them will [continue to affect businesses negatively]. They are first of all not business friendly and most of the Yelpers are bargain hunters. 90% of the reviews are complaints and it has become a complaint forum.
Why do you want business to pay / support a complaint forum. If people really care about business they can talk with the owners and resolve issues. You dont want people to give you a 1 star because they dont like the paint color or they didnt like the owners hair style.
I strongly suggest you should do research and write about how Yelp can hurt local community. Yelp makes a business by pitting customers against business. This is not a healthy model for the economy and local community.
The only way for Yelp to fail is to ignore them and stop their cash flow from businesses. If businesses understand this they will stop support to Yelp.
With so much compelling evidence, should business owners completely shun away Yelp?
Table of Contents
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away
The number one mistake that a business can make is to ignore Yelp. Yelp is a public company that isn’t going away any time soon. Whether a business owner likes it or not, consumers use Yelp on a daily basis to discover new restaurants and other types of local businesses. Just this week I used Yelp to find a Smog Check service and a Hair Cut Salon for men.
Why do customers give out more negative reviews than positive reviews?
Give a customer a good experience and he’ll go home happy.
Give a customer a bad experience and he’ll tell 5 of his friends about how terrible the business is.
This is just human nature, and is reflected in the distribution of positive vs negative Yelp reviews. The critical factor to take note of is that a Yelp user will write a negative review on Yelp even if you choose to ignore Yelp. All of Yelp’s users will see this negative review and your business will be hurt because of it.
This is why it’s so important to take ownership of Yelp and use it as a way to salvage a relationship with a distraught customer. Don’t ignore Yelp; take advantage of it to communicate directly with dissatisfied customers and fix the problem.
Yelp can be a huge positive for a business
A study by the Harvard Business School determined that a restaurant that boosts its Yelp score by one full star can see revenue increases from 5 to 9 percent. This is huge.
The goal of a local business is of course to serve great food and provide excellent service. Great food and excellent service will naturally drive positive reviews on Yelp, but there are strategies that you can use to encourage Yelp users to leave positive restaurant reviews.
Do not invest in Yelp Ads
Though we advocate strategies to get customers to positively review a local business on Yelp, we are highly against ads for Yelp. There are plenty of posts written about how Yelp ads do NOT target the right keywords and are NOT relevant to the user’s search terms.
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
In this case, stay as close as possible to Yelp because it has a big impact on your local business.
Related Reading
- How to Get More Yelp Reviews for Your Business
- The Octalysis Framework: Complete Gamification Framework
- The Beginner’s Guide to Google Maps Search