Yelp, is with worth it?

[CAautogroup]

Hello all,

 

Just wanted some general feed back from a few automotive repair shops regarding Yelp.

 

We have been contacted by a sales rep from Yelp for quite sometime now regarding paid advertisement, though we have declined. We have noticed a few negative reviews, and many positive reviews though they are not being displayed.

 

Is it worth it to "pay" Yelp and see what the outcome would be?

 

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

Nick

 

[mmotley]

We don't use yelp. I personally hate the idea of paying yelp when Google and Facebook are free. I'm lucky I guess that I only have two reviews on yelp and both are 5 star reviews

[Joe Marconi]

Yelp has a love/hate relationship. While I personally do not agree with their strategy, many companies do. And Yelp is very proactive with respect to search engine and ranking on the web.

 

I would speak to a local marketing person who understands web marketing, reviews and website/business ranking. There are other ways to promote your shop. Paying Yelp has to factor into your budget, and for some that can be costly.

 

Good luck and great post!

[mspecperformance]

Yelp works well if you aready have a strong internet presence and also a good amount of positive yelp reviews.

[CarER]

Yelp also works very well for us. That being said, we are in a town with a very large college student population. They love Yelp.

[alfredauto]

We have a free Yelp listing. I personally hate that anyone can leave a negative review even someone who flunked inspection and got their sticker scraped from coming in expired.

[UsedTireShop]

I paid Yelp for months and saw no measurable return. Do not fall victim to their 1 year contract. My landlord got a 3 month contract with them.

Yelp is good in some areas of the country and not so good in others. I would search auto repair shops in your area on Yelp and call them. Some will tell you if it works for them or not.

[xrac]

Occasionally, I receive a Yelp request for a quote. I always respond to these although it is difficult since the customer rarely provides adequate information. I think only once did anyone come in the shop from these requests. Is this par for the course. Anyone refuse to respond or do it any differently. 

[cmautocare]

We also have been approached many times by Yelp to "purchase" their advertising packages.  We have elected not to pay for their services because of the tremendous amount of responses (reviews and questions) that we get by being a free business associate.  

We used to have a negative attitude toward Yelp, that that was in the beginning.  We have a lot of clients who have found us using Yelp, as well as fair amount of positive reviews that continue to "work" for us.

[cmautocare]

On 5/22/2016 at 1:10 PM, alfredauto said:

We have a free Yelp listing. I personally hate that anyone can leave a negative review even someone who flunked inspection and got their sticker scraped from coming in expired.

Unfortunately, all the review sites (Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Sure Critic, etc) allow clients to leave negative reviews.  AND, the kicker, is it doesn't even have to be a real client or a real situation...if you have competition that wants to write negative reviews, there is REALLY NOTHING that can be done to delete them.  There are processes, but rarely do they work.

[PherBag]

I looked into paid yelp advertising. I called some shops that were advertisers. They were in big cities and yelp worked for them. Yelp is not popular in my area though. I get 8-14 views a week on yelp. I focus on Google and Facebook.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[lmcca]

they keep trying to get us, they call every few months and everytime they do i say, "i would absolutely like to advertise with yelp" and they go, really? thats great and i say, as soon as you stop blocking my customers good reviews.  The hiding of reviews doesnt work very good, i understand why they do it do the system does not work. For that reason, i'm out.

 

Edited July 24, 2017 by lmcca

[xrac]

On 7/23/2017 at 8:04 PM, PherBag said:

I looked into paid yelp advertising. I called some shops that were advertisers. They were in big cities and yelp worked for them. Yelp is not popular in my area though. I get 8-14 views a week on yelp. I focus on Google and Facebook.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I get 3-5 views a week on Yelp. It has never caught on here. 

[gandgautorepair]

We get decent response from Yelp, even when we didn't pay. I had to gradually accept that Yelp is here to stay, they promote themselves well, and people do use it. I finally gave in a few months ago to one of their lower priced packages...we'll see. We focus a lot on internet advertising, so I decided to add paying for Yelp as part of that. No definitive answer yet on whether it is worth it or not.

BTW, comment to a post above, Facebook isn't free. If you don't boost on Facebook it has very little value. Only 3-5% of people who like your page see a post that is not boosted. Also, if you want to advertise to your market area through Facebook, which we do very effectively, you must use paid ads. Also, while finding your shop on Google through searches is effective if you come up at or close to the top on organic searches, to really be effective takes pay-per-click, which isn't free. Pay-per-click costs vary quite a bit based on market area, so it isn't worth it for everyone, but it is very effective for us.

So, for us, since we pay for Google, and we pay for Facebook, it sort of made sense for us to try paying for Yelp as well. We'll see.

[Jay Huh]

I pay them $425/month for my first location. I get a lot of views through them but I don't think it's worth it, I rather spend the $425 on Google Adwords on top of the $2k im spending already.

Yelp would not freakin leave me alone so I finally gave in bc they offered to make a video too  (which I had to heavily edit, they really do a sorry job). 

Yelp customers are also one of the most entitled customers I have ever seen and difficult to keep happy, I know bc I am one. Nowadays I don't leave bad reviews bc I know how it can mess up a business.

My advice? Put money into Google. Also this might be controversial but I am having good results with Repairpal - it's only $199/month.

I did a 3 month contract because I was afraid of commitment but it's been over a year now....... why am I still doing it? Don't feel like talking to them, I hate talking to Yelp and the pushy sales people. Also, I am ranked really high with them, if you search "auto repair durham," the first website that comes up is Yelp's top 10 best automotive shops in Durham, NC. We are number 4 on that list. If you search by zipcode (27713), we are #2 on Yelp page (second to one of the best shops in the area that's been there for over 20 years, we are only 1.5 years old). I hate visiting my Yelp page bc it's only 4.5 stars and some of the reviews on there make me cringe. It is embarrassing and it could get to the point where the bad reviews will make it so new customers don't come anymore.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Jay Huh

[meowpox]

On 7/23/2017 at 10:20 AM, xrac said:

Occasionally, I receive a Yelp request for a quote. I always respond to these although it is difficult since the customer rarely provides adequate information. I think only once did anyone come in the shop from these requests. Is this par for the course. Anyone refuse to respond or do it any differently. 

I contacted Yelp to have them take down the "Request a Quote" feature that magically showed up on our page without our permission. Took them weeks to take it down, they said I was the only business in Yelp history to request this and thus they had to have engineers do back end programming to take it down. If it bothers you enough, contact them and they will take it down.