Getting 5 Star Reviews on Yelp, Guaranteed: Unofficial Guide to Ensuring Your Business Wins on Yelp

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This book is a guide on how to develop a Yelp strategy for your business and then how to drive solid business rankings within Yelp, obtaining quality 5-star reviews from your customers and clients. It also describes when you should think about getting 5-star reviews and quite simply how and when to ask for them. Since most of the time, improving your businesses overall score relies upon 5-star reviews, knocking down the importance of a 4-star review, you’ll learn the best practice techniques to do it. This book is ideally suited for a business owner or marketing manager, or someone who is looking to start a business. This book could also benefit marketing agencies, social media consultants and anyone else who frequently advises small or medium businesses routinely. Larger businesses, known as Enterprises, may also benefit if multi-locations are part of the business model and having a Yelp strategy for each store or within a geography. Some parts of improving a business Yelp listing with 5-star reviews is simple: it’s characterizing your business correctly and explaining what you can and simply can’t do in the nicest possible way. Think of getting a great standing with your business’ Yelp listing to be a marketing initiative. There are two parts of every marketing initiative, no matter how big or small your company is. There is the strategy – or the blueprint to your story: this is the approach on how you will tackle something. Your business will have a checklist of what to do to implement your strategy, which is your tactics –the actual to-do steps with your business, with Yelpers, and following their reviews. This book will go through both. Action without some thought can easily backfire, but more importantly, you may be spending more time than what’s needed for your particular type of business. I walk through three distinct successful strategies, and the tactics are explained in the most aggressive form – then broken down where the strategy calls for a less-aggressive approach. The guidance to write this all down came from a myriad of sources, with examples from real business owners and real data. In other words, I don’t speculate on what could or couldn’t work: after compiling and analyzing data for hundreds of thousands of reviews over eight years and working with Yelp directly on other projects, I do have a plethora of experience on what works and what simply doesn’t. Additionally, we own multiple businesses ourselves, small and medium, and we see also on the front lines on what can, does and often doesn’t happen the way we want it to in the way of Yelp. This book also comes by way of pruning through our own notes on what worked great – and what failed miserably. While the book is primarily focusing on how businesses successfully obtain 5-star Yelp reviews over and over again, I’d be selling snake oil if I didn’t elaborate on the other strategy alternatives. The beauty of being in your spot – you are the business-owner or marketer for your (or) other businesses - so you are in charge of business marketing initiatives, and you can give wind to the sails to a plan a garden of new business through more and better Yelp reviews which elevates your business star rating. Or, you can cut your time down and your marketing costs significantly by repositioning your business in a way that makes any negative reviews for your business simply irrelevant. But before implementing the tactics to do either, you have to give some thought if it’s practical, if it’s worth it, and if it’s even applicable to your business type.