I am working with for a company (1 of 3) that needs some social media help and overall management. The company does $15 million a year in sales. It is a flagstone/paver company in Texas and they are in 5 markets. Very successful and very busy. When you search the company name yelp comes up with only 2 reviews and both are bad. I am being told that there are actually 50ish reviews but Yelp is filtering only negative and wants to charge $3k a month to take the bad reviews off. I am new to this and want to know what needs to be done. This doesnt seem right... I might not have the full story either.

Yelp comes up on the first page and the company is 14 weeks out for install so these reviews hurt business sometimes.

Think you just bribe them, that's their whole business model.

Are you sure they are not just charging $3K a month for special advertising placement and such? Do they have someone on record saying they will remove the bad reviews?

There has been rumors of this (re: bribes or pay to remove bad reviews) for a while, but nothing of substance to back it up that I have seen/heard. I wouldn't doubt a sleazy salesperson here or there for Yelp uses this tactic to gain a sale, but I do not think it is Yelps business model, or they will actually remove bad reviews if they are indeed genuine reviews.

Most people just do not understand their review model and how their filter works. The 50 good reviews are likely people with only a few other reviews, zero to little friends, no picture, and no commentary on the "talk" feature in their home city. These are all the criteria which establish a user as being credible, which will make their review appear on the business page without being filtered. It is possible, if not most likely, that this business has been trying to game the site by someone or some people (asking friends or whatever) creating accounts and reviewing their own business, thus it makes the business flagged even more to Yelp to scrutinize the reviews coming in. This could also just be a "hey please review us on this site called Yelp" campaign they started with their customers and the reviews just don't look genuine because they user is not active.

That being said, Yelp is now doing "recommended" reviews from businesses and filtering out a lot of genuine ones even. I guess at some point when a business has hundreds and hundreds of reviews, they have to come up with a way to limit this I guess....not sure.

But the point is, unless this business gets genuine organic reviews from people who actually have a solid account on Yelp, or they pay people or businesses who do this with genuine accounts and game the site, they are pretty much sitting with their dick in their hand.

Yelp's been going after this claim hard recently, explicitly enough that they might be telling the truth:

http://www.yelp.com/advertiser_faq

Here is the page. The 2 recommended reviews are 1 star. There is a great 5 star review from a versed yelp user that gets "filtered" out.

10/14 reviews are good but the 4 bad show up first.

Any help?


http://m.yelp.com/biz/allied-outdoor-solutions-houston

afaik there is no recourse for you - just write a response to any negative feedback and move on.

generally not a fan of Yelp's filtering process but in this case most of the filtered positive reviews were from one hit wonders and were written within several days of each other. Even if they are genuine you can see why these would be filtered out

Need more organic positives from active users but I imagine not easy in that line of work

^yea meant to mention it in my last one, but I would suggest that when you get customers who are really happy with things, mention to them that you'd appreciate referrals and a positive online review with yelp or on google. you just need a good review streaming in once a month or so and the negative ones will soon be forgotten.

This. Find a way to effectively communicate to happy customers that you need positive reviews on social media. You could even do this when the final bill is presented and offer a very small discount to encourage happy customers to share there perspective of your company with others. It would still be cheaper then paying off yelp.
You can also "respond" to the negative review.
You can also create a ton of ghost accounts, build up credentials by reviewing restaurants or random businesses, and then give your biz glowing reviews.

I am going to build a plan and a customer follow up program. I will have to keep on top of this.

There is the 1 good review from someone w a lot of reviews and stars. I am confused why his isn't listed.

This is also my understanding.

What can i add to the search rankings to kick yelp to at least the 3rd page? This seems harder than getting them to remove the reviews.

I think you buy Google.

Im not sure exactly what Yelp's algorithm is for displaying the reviews - I know Amazon shows first the ones that most people found the 'most helpful'

The best way to handle it though is to write a response acknowledging the bad review, explain why the problem happened, try to make the situation right with the unhappy customer and perhaps learning from it?

(edit I just noticed the Owners response, that's probably not helping you)

I run ecommerce stores and every complaint is just another chance to improve the business, find out why they were unhappy, and fix it so it doesn't happen again. Occasionally you get an irrational moron who just loves to complain, but most people are just frustrated and obviously had there expectations go unmet.

As an aside, I've got friends who sell a lot of products on Amazon. While positive reviews are very important, whats even more important is how the 1-2 star reviews are handled by the seller (people scan straight to the negative reviews)
You can have a few, and if your seen as acknowledging them and trying to fix the situation publicly, it makes you appear much more genuine and trustworthy than just trying to cover **** up. No one trusts you if you have nothing but 5 star reviews either btw.

You cant just add stuff to the search rankings. Yelp ranks very highly because it's highly relevant and often exactly what people are looking for when they search for a companies name.
Unless you can create 20 websites that are MORE relevent to the searchers than yelp, its not going anywhere

Also no offense, why are you doing this sort of work if you have to ask 2+2?

Also I just noticed this company doesn't even rank no 1 for their own brand name. This is crazy and can be fixed with the most basic of changes.

And why on earth do they redirect their brand name domain to the one they are currently using.

You're doing SEO/online marketing work for these guys and their current title tag is:

<title>When you need concrete coatings in Houston, stamped concrete in Houston or a concrete overlay in Houston, one place offers excellence for concrete coating in Houston and more – Allied Outdoor Solutions</title>

No wonder SEO ppl have such a bad rep.

You should at a minimum be able to get them to rank for their own brand name above yelp simply by changing the title tag.

Read this for how to write one http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

I'd also switch to using their brand name domain instead of the current one

You could probably also get their social profiles - Facebook, Youtube etc to rank above Yelp with a bit of work.
But you'd need to update them, it looks like their facebook hasnt been touched since 2012.
You can build shady links to rank a facebook/youtube page without worrying too much about getting penalised due to the domain Authority of those sites

Also you could probably build dodgy links to other positive review sites like the BBB/ Houzz.com pages to try and rank above yelp.

Dont build shady links to their main site, this is just to get their other properties above Yelp, and you can take a bit of a risk IMO.

You could try to do this for any other directory sites they are listed on too if you are really serious.

I wrote that you couldn't get rid of yelp in my last post, but now I see the situation there's definitely alot of room for easy improvements. You might not get them off the first page, but you could try.

Google 'reputation management' - there's companies that specialize in this stuff. I'd recommend they hire one - there's a ton of work they need to do to fix all this up.

Another gem.

Step 1, get in touch with a sales rep and see what they say. They arent going to be very explicit about what they are offering and they wont actually remove the negative reviews, you just want a more accurate presentation of the current reviews
Step 2, decide if it is worth whatever they quote you
Step 3, respond to the complaints by being polite and professional and offering to help remedy the situation
Step 4, find a way to encourage happy customers to post yelp reviews
Step 5, move on

You arent going to be able to bump a site the size of yelp down to the 3rd SERP pretty much ever. You have a whole thread giving advice and links to SEO resources, you should have learned this by now, but I also thought youd learn to do your own research 10 threads ago.

All good information. I will start work on this soon.

As for why I am doing this work? Im not, I am managing other aspects of the business and other businesses (gets complicated) but there is so much need for help/improvement in this area that I am taking it on. Learning as I go. He is paying a lot of money currently and its obviously not working.

About the main brand domain. I wish I could get hims to switch but he seems to think that what he is doing now is best and someone must have sold him on that in the past.

Guys, I am taking all this info and will sit with a developer and attempt to work on the advice given. I AM NOT an SEO person, this is obvious but I am taking on this project to help his company out. I thank you guys for helping me learn this stuff.




What do you mean by these?::


-You can build shady links to rank a facebook/youtube page without worrying too much about getting penalized due to the domain Authority of those sites.
---What kind of links?


-Also you could probably build dodgy links to other positive review sites like the BBB/ Houzz.com pages to try and rank above yelp.
---Link from what?


-Where are you seeing the tag you listed? I see this "Allied Outdoor Solutions can beautify and enhance your concrete with CarveStone coatings. Call 1-800-GO-STONE. Located at 1557 W. Sam Houston Pkwy N."


-And if I convince him to switch to his brand for the main site instead of what he is using, is it a simple domain redirect? How would this affect current SEO and rankings if BYC is the one used now? For some reason he used BYC as a tag line for radio adds and he said that people remember BYC vs AOS. I disagree 100% and told him to redirect it the other way. He said it is what it is, were both saying the same thing. People get to the site no matter what.

He is talking about backlinks, You'd basically go around creating links. There is a hierarchy of link value and you likely couldn't get good ones which is why he says shady and dodgy links.

Google gets up set if you do this and would penalize your main page but if you use this strategy to sites with a high enough DA it might work -- I have no idea as I've never been in a situation where I've need to test if this would work.

Does having concrete in your domain and have that page be your main page outweigh using your brand as the main domain? Or if it were tagged properly with the correct backlinks, it wouldnt matter?

More important, is the realization that if I spent as much time reviewing things on Yelp, than i do on this subforum, I could be extorting money out of business owners for favorable reviews... Who wants to create a yelp shake-down syndicate?

Cap yeah as Henry said I was talking about building links to their other profiles, to try and get them ranking above Yelp. While this is really frowned upon by Google, It's unlikely you would get these sites penalised, simply because of the size of Facebook/Youtube.

It's not really guaranteed to work though, like anything with SEO there's a risk. It would involve buying links which is against Google's webmaster guidelines, that's why I called it shady.

I'm seeing it by right clicking, then clicking 'View Page Source'.
What you listed is their meta description. It doesn't effect seo rankings, but it can effect click through rates.

A title tag is different, and is probably the most important part of on-page seo - http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag.

Regarding changing the domains, if the owner doesn't want to change then I guess you're stuck. When you 301 redirect to a new domain, you might lose some rankings (they don't really have any though), but this can be recovered over time.

I think all these tactics are kind of irrelevant though. It's clear they need help with online marketing strategy beyond just getting rid of Yelp in the SERPS.

I think you gotta start with what are their objectives are from their online efforts.

Generate more leads from their website?
Ok.. How many are they getting now?
Is it being measured?
What would be a target improvement?
etc etc and go from there.

All this talk about seo and ranking is really just pointless unless they have measurable goals in place and are tracking them. The seo bit is just one tiny piece of it, and if you don't know what you are trying to acheive, then it's a waste of time.

ps. If this was my site, the first thing I would do would be to start using adwords for my own brand name, this will push Yelp down a spot and it would be very cheap to do, as no one else is bidding on it.

Bad decision.
Sorry if you got grifted by non-performers, but the reputation of a $15,000,000 annual company isn't something best left in the hands of someone doing it as a side job and learning as they go.

Yelp is a reputation extortion racket no different than the mugshot industry, Ripoff Report (<- Google Alert! Hi, Ed!) or the BBB.

The best strategy for those is ensuring you have someone capable of writing the King's English on call as the 'responding manager' throwing up effusive walls of text about how their concerns have been heard, why things aren't really as they claim but regardless, feel free to call me at any time on my "personal cel" (<- some burner you buy just for this purpose) thus creating the illusion that the disaffection has been assuaged and management is on the case.

You can't out-SEO Yelp. You can't negative-SEO them.

^^ agree with this. I was probably a bit optimistic with ranking your social profiles above yelp - especially if you haven't done this kind of stuff before.

But at a minimum when someone searches your brand in Google, you could have:

1. Adwords ad with all the possible Ad extensions to take up as much room as possible. you can even include reviews in adwords ads these days - showing 5 stars reviews before the Yelp listing. eg:

2. Your own domain, with a proper Google places/local listing that takes up a lot of space. You could use something like schema.org markup to include reviews for your own website - these will show up in the SERPS as star ratings, or ask happy customers to leave a review on your Google places page. When you get enough of these they should show up in the SERPs. eg:

3. If yelp isn't going away, find a proper way to deal with the bad reviews
4. An active facebook page - With more positive reviews from customers
5. The other review sites that show up are all positive - it's only the Yelp that looks terrible. If people see 1 bad review from Yelp, surrounded by otherwise positive listings, I think you can offset most of the damage from Yelp.

So between 1 Adwords ad and the top 4 SERPS you could have 3 of the 5 showing 5 star reviews in the SERPS, a Facebook page showing 5 star reviews, and only the one yelp listing showing negative feedback.

This would atleast get people to see why the yelp is negative, see a (hopefully) professionally written response from the owner, and make a decision then - which is what you want.

Other ideas - make a Wikipedia Page, if the company is large enough you should have no problem with this.
Make a youtube video with a quick profile of the company / interview with the owner. This can easily rank very highly, and will show that you are human.

He is paying about $5,000 a month to an "SEO Firm". He said they are one of the better ones and have done well for him. I see a lot of mistakes and you guys are just tearing into it (thank you). Here is what his firm is telling him when he questions.





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