Hello, my name is Shane Snyder, co-founder of Method Processing, Inc. The following techniques were identified through personal experience. I used to own/operate a web development company in Las Vegas, San Diego and Austin, TX. For each of those cities I was able to achieve and maintain the #1 position in the organic rankings until I sold the business in 2018.
Obviously I cannot make any guarantees as everyone’s situation is different and nobody knows the exact algorithm used by Yelp, however, I am very confident that the following instructions will help you increase your ranking if you follow the instructions exactly and consistently.
I’ve held nothing back. These are the literal actions I took and I genuinely hope they help you too:
Don’t be lazy with your business profile
When creating or editing your business listing “owner’s account”, make sure that you are filling out EVERY POSSIBLE editable field, engaging with every option and in general taking advantage of every opportunity to engage with your account. If it is asking about your business, really take your time to craft a good message. If it is asking you to review some other businesses you have had experience with, do it. Every field, every option. Take your time and create genuine/quality content for your account.
Login page for Yelp Business: https://biz.yelp.com/login
Pick the right profile image
In regards to your account’s profile image it is very important for you to choose an appropriate and high quality image. Not only will customers be turned off if your picture is no good, but Yelp themselves will actually ding you or force you to change your image. A close-up image of your face, your product, your logo or something like that is a good start. Do not choose an image that has a lot going on in it. If you have to “squint” to figure out what it is, then you have picked the wrong image for your account. Keep in mind, this image will be really small when it is seen by a customer as they are searching through the listings. Choose something that will catch their eye and is very relevant to what you offer.
Choose your industry categories wisely
Make sure the industry categories you select for your business listing are accurate and relevant. Don’t be overzealous with your selections. It may affect your rankings if you select too many categories. For example, if you are primarily a mortgage broker, but you do some real estate on the side, I recommend only selecting Mortgage Brokers as your company’s category, not Mortgage Brokers AND Real Estate Agents. You do not want to confuse Yelp, potential clients or the algorithm.
Research what key-phrases your customers are using
Identify and use the keywords people are actually using to find your services.
The easiest way to do this is to go to the Yelp Search bar on their home page and start typing words and services that are relevant to what you do. For example, if I go to the Yelp Search bar and type the word “loan”, a dropdown of relevant phrases will automatically populate.
The first phrases you see in the line-up will be the most popular keywords people are using to find your services. In this example, “loan officers” is the first keyword phrase that comes up in the line-up (notice it is plural). You can also try other root words like “Mortgage” and “Broker”. Once you have a short list of the phrases people are using to find your services, you want to use them in the following ways:
- Use them in the content of your “owner’s account” for your business listing in the places where it asks about your services, business history and other areas. Do not try to “over-stuff” your content with these words, just use them where you can in a natural way.
- When your customers review your business, it is extremely important that you suggest to them that they use these words naturally in their review. One of the strongest ways to get ranked in a Yelp search is to have the words, in your reviews, that people are searching for.
- If it works and it makes sense, try to include the key word(s) in your actual business name/Yelp listing title. For example, “Shane Snyder – Home Mortgages” has less potency in terms of showing up on the first page for the search term “Mortgage Broker” than “Shane Snyder – Mortgage Broker” does. If your business name is already set up and DOES NOT have a keyword in it, when you try to change it in your account, Yelp will stop you and review the situation. If your Logo and website does not reflect the name as you have requested it in your Yelp account, there is a good chance that they will not approve the change as they will assume you are just trying to stuff your Business name with keywords. The work-around to this, is that you can change your logo and/or website to reflect the new name you want Yelp to accept, and then after they have accepted it, you can revert your logo and website back to what it originally was. I did this and I believe it was a major factor in our rankings.
Upload images of your service/product
In your ‘owner’s account’ you can manually upload images of your services and/or products. It is important for you to know, the first image you upload is the one that will show as your business listing’s profile image. Make sure you upload the appropriate image first.
Once this is done, upload as many images as you can that are relevant to your business (pictures with past clients, pictures of your office, etc.). In the section that asks for a description of the image, take some time to give an appropriate description and also take the opportunity to use more of the keywords you identified in the step above.
Use ‘Page Upgrades’
Yelp likes it when you use the tools they have provided, so this can potentially help your ranking. Take a look at the ‘Page Upgrades’ area and see if there are any upgrades that are relevant to you and your potential borrowers. *I do not recommend paying for Ads, which is different from ‘Page Upgrades’ and different from their other paid features.
Get some reviews!
This may seem like a no brainer, but although Yelp officially states that review count does not help your rankings…it does. Having said that, it is not the only factor and it is not the main determiner, so don’t over-stress it.
At one time, in my previous business, we only had 11 out of 24 REAL reviews from our clients showing to the public on our Yelp business listing, and most of our competitors had way more than us. Yet we still ranked among them and eventually we surpassed them.
Yelp makes it very clear that they do not want you to ask for reviews, pay for reviews or offer something to your customers if they give you a review. However, they never said anything about not “supporting” your customers to leave a review.
In this “gray area”, I recommend doing the following to increase the amount of reviews you have on Yelp:
When you finish working with a customer, as part of your normal process, in some way, you should educate your customers to the fact that you have a Yelp account and that they can leave a review of their experience with you and your business if they feel so inclined. This should just be informative, as opposed to a “request”. For example, when we were finished with a client’s project, we would send them a final wrap-up email that also mentions the fact that they can leave a review for us if they want to and includes the direct link to do so.
Write an email or make a phone call to your current/past customers and simply let them know that you happen to have a Yelp business listing where they could leave a review of their experience with you if they were looking for this opportunity.
*You will want to stagger this outreach. If you get a bunch of reviews at the same time, Yelp will assume you are obtaining these reviews against their terms of service and will likely filter them into an area where nobody will see them.
Optimize your reviews
As you begin getting reviews, or if you already have a Yelp account with reviews in it, you will notice that some of your reviews are going to a “filtered” section and cannot be seen by the public unless they specifically try to find them. Yelp does this to weed out potential fake reviews. Unfortunately your real clients who do not spend the time it takes to properly setup their Yelp account will be caught in the crossfire.
If your clients reviews are being filtered out, this is what you can do about it:
- Tell your customers to fill out their Yelp profiles completely and add a profile picture of themselves if they haven’t already.
- Suggest that they connect their Yelp account to their Facebook account and that they add you as a personal friend as well as anyone else that the Yelp system recognizes as a potential personal friend.
- Tell your customers to be ‘natural’ when leaving you a review. Yelp actually prefers reviews that have some misspellings and seems “real”. A review that is extremely well written and over-the-top with praise is NOT something that you want.
- Let your customer know that being active on Yelp, even just a little, will increase the chance that their review of your company will be seen. Recommend that they write a review for another company other than yours and this will help.
The easiest way to do all of the recommended steps above is to educate your customer as much as possible up front when you originally inform them that they can leave you a review and then write them an email about some of these items down the road if you notice their review got filtered. Your customers want to help. They want their review to count. But if they don’t know what to do, their efforts may be wasted.
Pro Tip: This is extremely important: If you want to show up on Yelp’s organic search results for a specific city/area, then you need to have people review you that are physically located in that area. Yelp knows where reviewers are. For example, if you want to show up in a San Diego based Yelp search (that a borrower is performing), but mainly people from Texas have reviewed you, these reviews will not count nearly as much as a review from someone in San Diego. Be sure to get reviews from people geographically located near the city you want to come up for.
Request a quote from yourself
When you setup your business yelp account (or if you already have one) depending on the business category you are in, your profile will show something to the effect of “request a quote” or “request a consultation”. This is where a potential borrower can reach out to you through Yelps system. Keep in mind, when they are done requesting info from you through this feature, they are automatically asked if they want to also receive quotes/info from your competitors, and some of those competitors will already be selected as an option for them (this can actually be a benefit to you, mentioned below)
It is very important that you respond to these inquiries very quickly and never leave one hanging. The amount of time it takes for you to reply is shown to potential customers and if you reply within under an hour, the text is turned a special green color (and I believe this might help your ranking). Additionally, if you are a quick responder, the chances that YOU are the competitor shown to a potential customer who inquired with someone else, will be increased. This is a quick and easy way to get in front of a customer even if you are nowhere near the first page of Yelps organic listings.
So how do you get some inquiries and show that you have a quick response time (so you can obtain all the benefits mentioned above)? Request a quote/info from yourself and reply to yourself quickly. Use your personal email account. Have a friend do it. Whatever you have to do to get someone to request info from you, and simply reply quickly. This will get you a quick response time and boosted in the list of competitors that it shows a customer when they inquire with someone else.
If you go 7 days without replying to a new message and you have not responded to any message in the past 30 days, the feature will be automatically disabled on your profile and Yelp users will not be able to message you. This can be remedied if it happens to you, just google how to fix it.
Be active on your Yelp “owner’s account”
You may think, “I already have so much on my plate, I don’t have time to engage with my Yelp account!”
Let me put your worries to rest. If you log into your Yelp account every other day for 5 minutes, this would be enough. I believe Yelp will take your business more seriously if you are engaged within their platform. Don’t ignore it.
Inside of your Yelp “business account” you have the ability to write private messages to people who have reviewed you and you can also comment publicly on the reviews you have received.
DO NOT “thank” people for the review they gave you, instead respond to the review with something new or educational about your business that is relevant to the review itself. Yelp doesn’t want you to simply “thank” people, and may even ding you for it.
Especially if you have a “bad” review, take the time to respond, state your policy on the matter and show that you are genuinely concerned about the unhappy reviewer and their issue. You wouldn’t believe how much benefit your business will receive for simply responding professionally to a bad review.
Extra Credit/Theoretical
The techniques listed above are things we “know” will benefit your Yelp listing. I recommend taking some quality time to really dive into these items and see where they land you in the rankings. The more effort and consistency you give it, the better your rankings will become. You may be surprised that you go to the first page of most relevant searches within a few days to a few weeks.
The following items are recommendations that go a bit deeper, however from experience I am not entirely sure if they boost your account (we have tested some of them and have received inconclusive results).
After you have done everything listed above, if you are still struggling to rank well on Yelp, give these a shot. We recommend doing one at a time and waiting at least a week before adding another technique to your efforts. This way you will be able to identify which items actually worked.
Add a link to Yelp on your website
In the “top fold” (meaning not in the footer or bottom of your website) add a link-out to your Yelp profile. You can build your own graphic that links to your Yelp profile or you can use their pre-made “review badges”.
*The Pre-made review badges are not easy to find like they used to be. I had to dig for them. Once you are logged into your Yelp business account, use this link and it should take you to the old page where these used to be: https://biz.yelp.com/bling/Bgdv7mMST1YxS8whu7pDtQ
*We are not 100% sure that this helps, but Yelp will like this either way and we believe it can help with your ranking.
Embed reviews on your website from Yelp
To embed one of your reviews on your website, find the review on the main site and then:
- Hover over the review so that the review options appear
- Click Embed review
- Copy the embedding code
- Paste the code into your website where necessary
Please note that you can only find the “Embed review” option when viewing a business page on Yelp.com – it’s not available in the Yelp app, the Yelp for Business Website, or the Yelp for Business app.
Purchase “Page Upgrades”
There are a bunch of new features and functions that Yelp provides business owners nowadays. I have not yet had a chance to review and research all of these, however, in general, I recommend reviewing them and considering them for your efforts because this may help boost your profile in the rankings. I will update this blog post when I have more information.
Well, there you have it. Since 2010 I have received hundreds of clients from Yelp. If done correctly, and if you spend just a little bit of your time, you can easily get your listing to the first page of Yelp for the majority of searches that people are doing. We always beat our competition in the rankings, and they always had far more reviews than we did…
If you have any additional questions or if I could explain something better, please write to