How Yelp Ratings Can Make or Break Your Online Image

Posted: Nov 18, 2012
Author: WordJack Media

Where is the first place people go when they want to find out if a business is worth giving their hard-earned money to? The answer to that question is easy: the internet.

There are several business review websites out there, Yelp being one of the most popular, where anybody can go to rant or rave about their favorite and least favorite local businesses. They can leave a star rating (with one star being the worst and five stars being the best) and comments. These reviews can then be searched and read by anyone online. If your business gets good reviews, you’re in good shape. A few really bad reviews, on the other hand, could seriously hurt your business.

A recent article published in the Economic Journal revealed the results of a study of about 300 San Francisco restaurants and their Yelp ratings. The study found that if a restaurant could improve its star rating by just half a star, it was much more likely to fill all its available seats for lunch and dinner, even without any change in prices or quality of food or service. And because Yelp rounds to the nearest half-star when computing an average rating, two restaurants with nearly the same average rating (for example, 3.24 vs. 3.26 stars) can appear to be very different (3 stars vs. 3.5 stars, respectively) on the site. That means every single review makes a difference.

With this in mind, here are a few good questions to ask yourself:

• Do I know what my star ratings are and what kind of reviews my business has received on Yelp?
• Have I checked other business rating sites, too, like TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, Google+ Local, Yahoo, Citysearch, or MerchantCircle?
• Can I do better about encouraging my customers to leave positive online reviews about my business?
• Am I responding appropriately to my business’ reviews?
• Could there be some negative reviews about my business online that my potential customers are reading, but I’m not even aware of?
• If someone posted something negative about my business on one of these sites, would I know about it? And would I know how to respond?

Managing your business’ online reputation is one of the most important things you can do—it could mean the beginning of a wild success streak or a quick and painful demise.