Want to recover filtered Yelp reviews? Here's how
Yeah, we’re all frustrated with Yelp Most dealers have tons of awesome positive reviews that get filtered and don’t count towards their aggregate score. In this week’s Wednesday Workshop video, we share a simple process that can help you recover many of those filtered reviews. Watch and learn how you can get those reviews back and boost your score
Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. We’ve got a quick tip to help you with your Yelp reviews this week.
We all know that Yelp is difficult to deal with – in fact, most people refer to it with this emoji – and like my old partner in crime the Hair used to say, that’s not chocolate yogurt.
Yelp’s review filter is incredibly frustrating. Basically, if someone isn’t a regular Yelp user, then their review will get filtered. Most dealerships have tons of great reviews that don’t show up – and don’t get counted in the aggregate review score – because the people who wrote the reviews don’t really use Yelp.
So here’s a simple tip to help you recover those great reviews and boost your score without actually acquiring any new reviews. All you need to do is contact those reviewers and ask them to leave a few reviews for other businesses and make a few friend connections inside of Yelp.
It’s really that simple. You can either look them up in your CRM and send them emails, or you can contact them inside of Yelp with a direct message. Explain to them that Yelp has filtered their review because they’re not regular Yelp users, and if they leave a few more reviews and make a few connections with friends, their awesome review of your dealership will start showing up.
Typically, we see about a 20% response rate when we do this sort of Yelp reviewer outreach. If you’ve got 50 filtered reviews, that’s at least 10 reviews you’ll be able to pop out of the review filter limbo with just a little bit of effort!
That’s all the time we’ve got for today. As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week with 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 One Comment
- howard isaacs says: September 17, 2018 at 2:11 pm yelp sucks! would love to have reviews stick Reply
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