How to Make Your Mobile Service Company a Top-Rated Yelp Business

Yelp is a business review site. It lets consumers rate and review the experience they have with businesses. To become a top-rated Yelp business, you have to have top-notch service, but knowing how the system works and how to encourage more reviews doesn’t hurt either.

The Benefits of Being a Top-Rated Yelp Business

Having a high number of positive Yelp reviews can have a number of benefits:

  • It can help to convince future customers to do business with you.
  • It can refer traffic to your website and booking forms when people come across your Yelp listing..
  • Your SEO can see a boost from including reviews within your site.
  • You can get more traffic, but having your star rating visible in your search results, causing more searchers to click through to see what you’re about.

What follows is a list of tips for claiming, completing and promoting your Yelp business profile.

Start with Excellent Customer Service

The best way to earn great reviews is exactly that — to earn them. Before you can be a top-rated Yelp business, you have to have the kind of service that people will rave about.

After that, it’s just a matter of putting the mechanics in place to collect more reviews, to keep them positive, and celebrate your reputation as a crowd favorite.

Be Known for Something

Having “the best service” isn’t enough. Anyone can claim to be the best at something. But being known for something specific can help you generate buzz.

You can go all-out and have a trademark outfit like Men In Kilts, or you can make it something more subtle and service-specific, like Jiffy Junk’s “white glove” service. Their promise is not only to remove your junk but to leave the area “broom-clean” when they leave.

Planting the seed of that promise sets a certain expectation, but it also gives customers who leave reviews a theme to work with. When your Yelp reviews have a pattern of consistency around one thing, it becomes easier to create momentum and get even more favorable reviews. Go the extra mile to get a good review. It will be worth it.

Yelp Business

Claim Your Business

Now let’s get down the specific tactics of managing your Yelp profile. The first step is to claim your profile.

Go to biz.yelp.com and search for your business. If you find it, click the “claim your business” button. Otherwise, click “add your business to Yelp.” You will now be directed to a page to create a business owner account. Fill out the required information and create the account or log in if you already have an account. It may take a few days for the listing to be approved. You will have to wait for confirmation and instruction for claiming the business.

When you get to the map page, make sure the map pin is in the right location for your business.

Complete Your Listing

Add any specific information that you have that will be helpful. Your hours of operation, your website, and a short description of your business. Maybe sure you select the correct category for your type of business.

You can also add photos, so pick some good ones. It’s a good idea to have at least one of your trucks or vans and one of your business exterior. If you can, include one of a smiling face. Smiles make people smile. It’s an easy way to communicate an attitude of your business.

Share Your Listing via Social Media

When your listing is complete, it’s time to share it. Yelp provides handy share buttons for Twitter and Facebook, or you can copy the link and share it yourself on all of your networks.

Have a newsletter? People who stay subscribed to your newsletter are more than likely fans, so add a note in the footer of your emails with a link to your profile.

Encourage People to Leave Reviews

Have received positive feedback from a customer? Why not ask for a review? You may not always want to ask, but in some cases, you can tell that someone is happy to help promote their business. The #1 reason why people leave reviews is to help other people. Whether the reviews are good or bad, their primary motivation is to help future customers make a buying decision based on their experience.

Tap into this desire by asking your happiest customers for a review. You can script the ask into your face-to-face interactions with customers, or include a link to Yelp in your follow-up email. Create the ability for them to leave a review and do the hard work of asking for it (we’ll admit, it’s not always easy to do). You’ll be that much more likely to get more reviews and to keep them rolling in.

Resist the urge to try to populate your reviews all at once though. Anything that resembles solicitation of reviews will appear to be disingenuous and the Yelp community will see right through it. You’ve got to build your reputation over time, in a genuine fashion.

Get the Good Stuff Out of the Filters

Yelp has an algorithm that will filter out reviews that seem spammy or outside of the norm. It could be because the reviewer’s profile is incomplete, or for whatever reason seems less-than-legitimate.

Check the filtered reviews on your listing to see if there are any 5-star gems that you are missing, and take action to get them included in your overall score. AllBusiness.com has some tips that will help.

First, follow the Yelpers stuck in your filter. That might be enough to make their reviews visible. If that doesn’t work, try reaching out through the Yelp messaging platform to those people who have left positive reviews that are stuck in the filter. Let them know that you appreciate their feedback and you hope they’ll update their review and hopefully get put back on the main page. Your next best bet is to message these Yelpers with specific instructions for making their review appear more legitimate:

  • Ask them to add a profile picture. Images make a user look more engaged with the site and less likely to get filtered out.
  • Ask them to “check in” on their mobile phones from a few local places. Again, this indicates to the Yelp algorithm that they are human beings who engage with the app consistently.
  • Encourage them to be active. Although your end goal is to get the review for your business out of the filter, it helps if the Yelper is a frequent user. If they write a handful of reviews, it is more likely to get the review of your business up onto the main page.

Highlight the Importance of Positive Reviews to Your Field Team

Your business is at its best when your entire team is proud of their work. Positive reviews reinforce that sense of pride. Objective feedback from customers is a great way to boost morale among your whole team.

When you get a great review, share it with your team. Let them know that your whole business is proud of the feedback you’ve received. That kind of positive reinforcement will foster the kind of customer care and service that will lead to even more reviews. Keep up the good work in all areas of the company.

Invest in Customer Service Training

Customer service is often dismissed as a soft skill that is not worth investing in training for. Nothing could be farther from the truth. While your team definitely needs to possess the hard skills to do their jobs, whether it’s moving furniture, dangling from ropes to clean windows, or sorting through junk and recycling, there’s also something to be said for good customer service skills.

To be a top-rated Yelp business, you have to set yourself apart. Your interactions with customers should follow a script template, to make sure that each call is a complete one, and that all their needs are met. Taking time out each year to brush up on training and making sure new team members are properly onboarded is an investment worth making.

With new hires, have them shadow your best people, so they can learn from their experience. Take time out each year to have an off-site training or team-building days that involve a little bit of fun, and a little bit of skills training. The overall morale and attitude of your team will be reflected in the reviews you receive.

Display Your Reviews on Your Website

When people see your good Yelp reviews, they are more likely to book with you. But that’s not all. They are also more likely to review your business. A good star rating from Yelp and some objective feedback from customers can go a long way towards setting you apart from your competition.

If you are invested in becoming a top-rated Yelp business and your competition is not, that could be the differentiator that tips things in your favor. As people see customers voicing their preference in the form of positive reviews, it creates a snowball effect that will continue to grow over time.

Code Your Yelp Reviews into Your Search Results

When a potential customer searches for your service online, what do they see? They might see your website among a list of other competitors. They might also see your business listed on Yelp in their search results.

Those few seconds for a customer, between conducting a search and deciding where to click are crucial. If you code your star rating into your search result, it might entice that crucial click at exactly the right time.

Not only that, but the presence of reviews coded into your site might also make the search engines favor your site over others. SEO is both an art and science. While we may never know the exact criteria for how a search engine chooses which site to rank first in any given search, we do know that the presence of reviews, especially positive ones from reputable sites like Yelp, can help.

Celebrate Your Status as a Top-Rated Yelp Business

You made it. You’re loved by people on Yelp. Don’t be shy about it, tell the world! Use Yelp badges and stickers to help celebrate your newfound status.

Just as seeing the positive reviews and star ratings on your website, on Yelp itself and in your search results can help customers decide to choose you, so to can that little badge declaring your Yelp-fu.

You’ve invested a lot of energy into great customer service and achieving great reviews. Don’t hesitate to celebrate that.

Follow-up on Reviews, Good and Bad

Your customer service interactions don’t end when an appointment is over. And not even after a customer leaves a review. Whether they have sung the praises of your service or offered constructive feedback on how you can improve, they deserve a follow-up. It will reflect well on your company to show that you can about every piece of feedback you receive.

In the case of a good review, your follow-up can help turn a happy customer into a lifelong advocate for your business. In the case of a less-favorable review, it presents a learning opportunity. More than that, it gives you a chance to be graceful in your acceptance of that feedback. You could possibly even earn the elusive and wonderful service recovery.

If nothing else, future visitors will see that your service and reputation are important to you. One word of caution though: beware the trolls. Some people can never be pleased. It’s up to you to know when to step away gracefully too, if necessary.

Yelp Tips and Yelp Reviews

Sometimes a customer doesn’t leave an entire review and chooses instead to leave a tip. No, we’re talking about a gratuity, but a helpful little tidbit to help future customers do business with you.

Where a review is a more comprehensive assessment of your service, a tip is generally briefer. Something like: “Order the packing service too! Their team are total pros.  It saved us a lot of time and headache to have them pack for us. It’s worth it.”

Tips won’t always help convert new business, but they will help the customer be better informed.

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