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Trok198

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Does anyone have any experience with Yelp? They recently contacted me about paying them a monthly fee of 350-1000 depending on how often each month they promote my pizzeria. They say my town and pizza was searched for x amount of times and my pizzeria was found 43 times last month. I’m skeptical that I will get enough new customers to make this worth it. If anyone has any input I’d greatly appreciate it.
 
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Wouldn’t pay them anything, people don’t go to Yelp to do a search they go to google. Make sure you have a google business page and a high ranking website.

We got listed on many of these sites and not a single lead, all they do is sell on you contact information so you get bombarded with sales calls. Whenever they call us now, we ask to be removed.
 
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I claimed my locations and set up an owner account so that I could get some control over the information. They send me an update weekly like this:
Recent Activity
October 10 - 16, 2011
Click to expand...
Aver’s Pizza
317 E Winslow Rd
Bloomington, Indiana
Edit Your business had 36 page views

Activity on Yelp’s Mobile Apps
Learn More

Your business was viewed 11 times
1 telephone call was made to your business

Aver’s Pizza
1837 N Kinser Pike
Bloomington, Indiana
Edit Your business had 5 page views

Activity on Yelp’s Mobile Apps
Learn More

Your business was viewed 2 times

I think it would be a good idea to take the time to control your content. People with “foodie” type personalities really like to surf these rating sites looking for cool places to eat or dishes to try and some assume the role of amateur food critics. Can’t hurt to convey your message to people that like to eat good food! Also, Facebook lists Yelp as a partner site so traffic can flow between the two.

They do offer advertising and Groupon type deals on the site. But unless you are in San Francisco or one of the other cities where they have basically become the local phone book, you can find better avenues to spend your advertising dollars.

Urbanspoon is another “big” site that comes to mind where you can control your message.
 
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We are in an area where people use Yelp a lot. People use Yelp to find new places and check out the reviews for places they’ve heard of but never tried, and they do have search tools (similar to Google). However, I signed up for their advertising and will not resign after my contract ends. We get a lot of new customers who find us on Yelp, but these people seem to be the same breed as the folks who use Groupon. Most of them spend so much time looking for the next great place that they do not turn into regulars. Also, I pay for the ads and the ads are clicked on about 1/5 as often as my actual listing. This makes me feel like they will find me anyway and the listing is free.

All-in-all, not the worst money I’ve spent as I have gotten customers in my door. But not the best advertising $ either.
 
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I just spoke with Yelp as well. What a ripoff. I could see spending $50 a month or so, but $350 is absurd for small businesses. That’s a healthy fraction of my total advertising budget! The lady showed me a graph indicating that Yelp’s web traffic substantially exceeded Urbanspoon. But, I checked my analytics and, over the past 90 days, I’ve received 3 times more referrals from Urbanspoon as I have from Yelp (I don’t advertise with either).

Pair the above with all the allegations about Yelp offering to alter content for paid advertisers and I would be very leary about shelling out cash to them…
 
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Thank you very much for the responses. Needless to say I will be turning down their offer.
 
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I hate Yelp and the rest of these online review sites. The majority of the reviews for my place are positive, but I still detest these sites. I think at some point the popularity of these sites is going to wane, especially given that you can buy reviews for $5.
 
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I agree, all these sites $uck. At the very least, ALL reviews should expire after a year or 18 months at most… In our case we had a competitor trash us in one review and not only did trip advisor refuse to remove the review it is still sitting there 3 years later doing damage. I will not give any of them a nickle.
 
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