How To Get Good Yelp Reviews To Stick

A new service we've been offering at Zebralove Web Solutions is Review Management. Reviews are incredibly important to SEO these days, people tend to click on the search engine listings that have the most positive reviews. As I've been working with my clients on review management, Yelp has consistently been problematic. Often times businesses who have great reviews on other review platforms have terrible reviews on Yelp. It’s mostly because Yelp wants you to pay. What they are basically doing is “filtering” reviews with an algorithm.

A new service we've been offering at Zebralove Web Solutions is Review Management. Reviews are incredibly important to SEO these days, people tend to click on the search engine listings that have the most positive reviews. As I've been working with my clients on review management, Yelp has consistently been problematic. Often times businesses who have great reviews on other review platforms have terrible reviews on Yelp. It’s mostly because Yelp wants you to pay. What they are basically doing is “filtering” reviews with an algorithm.

For example, I left a yelp review for Snickerdoodles (a coffee shop in my town) and the next day when I checked it (on a different browser where I wasn’t logged in), my review had been moved to the “Not Recommended” review section.

I’ve been doing some testing and it isn’t that yelp is filtering all your positive reviews, It’s just that they are generally making it hard to leave reviews unless you use Yelp all the time (and a lot of that population likes to leave negative reviews).

Fortunately, I’ve done some research and I now know how to get positive reviews to stick!

Step 1. You need friends. Yelp has a feature that allows you to connect with others. The easiest way to do this is to link your Yelp account with your Facebook account.

Step 2. You need a number of reviews before they will stop being filtered. The first couple of reviews you leave will almost definitely get filtered. I recommend using your first couple of reviews on businesses you are Luke warm about.

Basically that’s it! I’ve left 4 reviews over the past week which have not been filtered!

One other note, you can often get reviews out of the "not recommended” section by going there and marking the review as “funny”, “useful” or “cool” so if you see a business that’s getting unfairly filtered by Yelp you can help them out by tagging their positive reviews in this section.

Milly Welsh

Owner

Zebralove Web Solutions

Milly has 18 years experience in designing and developing websites, developing apps, and online marketing. She is an expert at driving traffic to websites utilizing SEO strategies and custom digital marketing efforts. Her company, Zebralove Web Solutions offers full service digital marketing and website development. Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization services, and secure web hosting services.

Contact Author