Let’s face it, we all hate dealing with Yelp. Thanks to the aggressive filter, dealerships lose out on hundreds of awesome positive reviews. In this week’s Wednesday Workshop, I share a secret tactic that can help you recover a significant number of those positive reviews. They’ll show publicly, raising your review count and giving you a better aggregate rating.

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. This week we’re talking about Yelp.

Yeah, I know – we all hate dealing with it, but it’s a necessary evil. More than anything else, dealers hate how Yelp filters out all the positive reviews and seems to only show the negative or neutral ones.

So what’s really going on is that Yelp only wants to show reviews from people it considers to be “regular Yelp users”.

So if someone leaves you a glowing review, but they’ve never used Yelp before and haven’t reviewed any other businesses, that review’s going to get filtered out.

So today, I’m sharing a little trick that will help you recover some of those reviews.

Since we know they were filtered because Yelp doesn’t think they came from regular Yelp users, all you have to do is ask them to use Yelp.

Simply look up the reviewer in your CRM and then shoot them an email that says something like “hey, thanks so much for the awesome review on Yelp. Unfortunately, Yelp filters out reviews from users who don’t use Yelp very often, so yours isn’t showing up for the public. Could you take a few minutes to leave a few reviews for other local businesses that you like, and also make a few friend connections in Yelp? That will pull your review out of the filter so everyone can see what you said.”

And boom – you’ll recover several reviews from the filter, upping your overall count and increasing your aggregate score – without actually getting any new reviews.

Yes, it’s really that simple. We typically see anywhere from a 20-30 percent return rate when we use this tactic.

So now you know how to recover some of those awesome filtered reviews you’ve got on your Yelp listing. If you’ve got any other questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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Greg Gifford is the Vice President of Search at Happy Hao Car. He has over 16 years of online marketing and web design experience, and has specialized in automotive SEO for the last 8 years, helping hundreds of auto dealers thrive while the industry has struggled during the recession. Greg speaks internationally at both automotive and SEO conferences, teaching thousands of small business owners and marketers how to get their sites to show up higher in local search rankings. Greg also spends his spare time doing freelance website design and SEO for local businesses. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.

Join the discussion 4 Comments

• Anthony Del Vecchio says: March 29, 2019 at 12:54 pm I like your videos, but overuse of the sad trombone made this the most annoying thing I’ve seen in 2019. Reply Greg Gifford says: April 22, 2019 at 4:09 pm So sorry Anthony! Definitely wasn’t trying to be annoying, we just thought it was really funny to use the sad trombone sound every time we mentioned Yelp Reply
• Crawford says: April 1, 2019 at 11:44 am you playing that sound effect after everytime you said yelp seriously makes me want to shoot myself. i came for the knowledge not some dumass trumpet sad sounds that someone thought would enhance your video. The first time ok but you mustve played that sound 50 times then I stopped listening. Reply Greg Gifford says: April 22, 2019 at 4:11 pm Crawford – sorry you didn’t like the joke our team thought it was a funny gag BECAUSE of the fact that we used the sound effect every time. We’ll dial it back a bit in future videos – Reply

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