We are disappointed that Yelp refuses to show our reviews because we refuse to give them $550 per month. We always ask our customers to write a review on us whether it may be good or bad. We work harder for the fact that we know the customer has the power to make us or break us. The best thing that ever happened to me was the internet review.Google places and now Yelp as well as Angie’s List. We thought about getting our reviews in front of more people . Yelp contacted us because we were getting so many good reviews. I talked with two salespeople there at Yelp. Andrew and Allison. What I found with each of them was a very aggressive approach to sales. Each person was friendly but also insisting that I spend money with yelp so more people could find us. It sounded like a good idea and we were ready to commit until we read the contract. Yelp has their salespeople send over an extensive contract to be signed electronically. The fact that it is several digital pages put up a big red flag. I read through the agreement and i saw that Yelp will require a 1 year contract and they also have a two month cancellation fee. The cancellation fee would equal $1100 . As a small business owner there is no way that I could ever afford that fee. Yelp was not willing to guarantee results and i was just not sure how much integrity this company actually had at this point. I asked the salesperson to void that portion and she said she would but then raised the price per month for the service. I became even more cautious of yelp after they had one of their star B school MBA’s get on the telephone. She was trying to take charge of the conversation and insisted that 40,000 other customers did not have a problem with the fee or the contract. A typical used car lot high pressure tactic.
I had a difficult time agreeing with the MBA from Yelp.
Yelp’s goal after all is to get the stock price up. My goal is to put a good roof on and to have my customers think and for that matter write positive comments on me. i suppose you cannot win in this world if you work hard and with integrity. It makes me sad and upset that the newest and i thought best thing about providing service is really just a scam by a bunch of slick MBA’s that feel they deserve a cut of my business and all the content of the comments made by my customers.
The customers reviews are accepted when submitted but Yelp filters them and forces the person seeking the reviews to go through a captcha process . Basically yelps filter hides the reviews if the contractor does not pay. You can reach Yelp at 646-666-1890
I think I am not uncommon than other business owners and I see a failure coming of the Yelp business model.
I recommend that you sell Yelp Stock now the price is $21.96 but after enough businesses catch on expect to see $1.50 per share or less.
Yelp makes contractors pay if they want their customers reviews to show up
I found this page through a Motley Fool posting. A few things to know about Yelp:
1) Yelp will take a 3-month contract on advertising, if you want to give it a whirl. Hold your ground with the sales person. Salespeople work on a monthly quota, and 12-month contracts help them reach it quicker.
2) Almost nobody who’s seen good reviews disappear will believe this, but you don’t have to advertise with Yelp–it has nothing to with your reviews. We have clients with wonderful reviews on their Yelp page who refuse to advertise, as well clients who did advertise and then stopped. Yelp is now an international public company with investor and SEC oversight, not to mention a lot of hungry class-action lawyers looking for deep-pocket targets. Common sense should tell you that the 600+ just-out-of-college, high-turnover Yelp salespeople are not calling in to a central IT department and issuing orders to manipulate reviews of small businesses that don’t sign an advertising contract with them. If this were true, there’d be a lot of whistle blowers and smoking guns.
3) If you don’t believe point 2 above, and you don’t want to advertise, here’s a strategy: when a Yelp sales person calls, tell them you don’t have any money and will probably go out of business in a few months. Our clients tell Yelp sales people to call us, and we tell them our client doesn’t have any money for advertising. So if you have a marketing consultant or agency, give them this job.
4) We’ve found that “organic” traffic from Yelp to a website can have amazingly high conversion rates. But you need to have overall positive reviews and a good rating on your Yelp profile page, and the higher up you are on the industry category page for your location, or a search for roofing keywords within Yelp, the more traffic you’ll get.
5) Even if you dislike Yelp, you should not ignore it because it’s a powerful force with consumers and gets high rankings in search engines. Run a Google search on your company name, and chances are high that after your website, your Yelp profile page is the very next search result.
Hope this is helpful.
Well please disclose if you work PR and damage control for Yelp. Do not worry about my wrath worry about the wrath of my customers that include several journalists.
I have no relationship with Yelp at all. My company, Review PROXY, helps local business to get honest customer reviews they deserve on review sites, which include Yelp. And since Yelp is so influential, obviously Yelp is important so we study Yelp and are deeply informed about it. There’s nothing hidden here. My company is Review PROXY. My name is Alan Coon, and I’ve been a marketing professional for 30 years, and involved in online marketing since the beginning commercial Web in 1995–mostly specializing in search engine marketing and SEO. Before that I was a public relations, public affairs expert, with the largest international public relations agency. I’ve got a mini bio on the About Us page of our site, and I’m happy to email a more detailed bio to anyone who’s interested.