Yelp reviews are great for customers… but they are probably bad for businesses. Think about it… Yelp is a massive site that is accessed by millions of people every day, yet they have complete control over all of the content and reviews on their site.
Why should local and offline businesses want to send their customers to Yelp to provide reviews of their services? Simply because they don’t know any better.
Sure, Yelp probably brings a decent amount of attention and customers to some businesses, but they can also do more harm than good.
It’s not surprising that most people find more value in negative reviews, so does Yelp. With more negative reviews it means Yelp gets more attention from their business partners and more pages and advertisements for their visitors.
I actually wrote a post last month about how you can use negative reviews on Yelp to scope out the competition and make your business even better.
Yelp has also been in the news lately for suing a business users on their site for posting fake reviews on their accounts. While at the same time Yelp has also been found to have nearly 25% of their content be fake reviews or never even publish a quarter of the reviews that actually get posted to the site!
So the question is… why would you want to risk your business’s reputation by sending your customer to a site that might not even post legitimate reviews for your site. Instead businesses should be collecting their own reviews and building them up on their own sites.
Yelp doesn’t have to be the beginning and end for reviews. If you want to control your online reputation and customer reviews, you are going to need to collect them yourself and build out your own sites to fill up the search results when someone is looking for your business name and local restaurants.
I’m not the only who thinks Yelp can be a monster for your business. Take a look at these five other reasons why people are staying away from Yelp!
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