Due to the success of Justin Bazan, OD and a few others I have taken a serious interest in Yelp. However here in Tampa, my experience in the last two years has been nothing but disappointing. Because I know a lot of doctors have questions about how exactly to use Yelp for their practice, I thought I would take a moment and give some guidelines, so that others are not as disappointed as I have been.
First, let me say that I do believe in the concept of the Yelp. I think the idea of self-policing community of people who take pride in contributing reviews of businesses it in their neighborhood makes a lot of sense. I also occasionally use it personally. Yes, if I am somewhere where I haven’t been before and I am looking for a check in special, I’ll check Yelp. (However I should point out that I use it foursquare much more consistently, and with better success.)
As a business owner, Yelp is kind of paradox. You can’t actually ask people to review your business because those reviews will get flagged and filtered (meaning they will not be seen by most people). I understand the rationale for the filter because it helps prevent people from fraudulently reviewing their own business or their competitors. However that means there’s basically nothing you can really do to encourage people to use Yelp except have signs and stickers and incentives which just confuse non-Yelpers.
There is a way to get some of the reviews unfiltered as Dr. Bazan explains in this interview. But the result is pretty ugly too as you look at my Yelp page. All of the reviews on my page are legit (written by real-live satisfied people) but many of them do not have pictures and do not have more than one review or any for a small number of friends
I’ve tried off and on over the last two years to get involved organically in the Yelp community by participating in the talk threads on the site and organizing and attending Yelp meetups but none of that has translated into even a single patient for my practice. This year I tried to step it up by signing up for a six months paid advertising program with Yelp. It has cost me about two grand and, to the best of my knowledge, has not gotten me any patients and it has even cost me all little money in coupons from Yelp that patients who were already planning on coming to see me redeem. One upside to paying them money was that the Yelp pages do trend very high on Google searches for optometrists in my area. But again if I’m paying $300 a month and only get 20 ad clinics and none of them come me and asked patients then that doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.
So here is how I think the average optometrist should approach Yelp:
Every optometrist should find and claim their Yelp page for free. The pages already exist and there is no benefit in ignoring them. ODs should load the page with accurate useful information (as the business owner) and learn how to view and respond to reviews. If there are negative reviews, learn from them and respond to them appropriately. You can read more about that here and here.
Despite whatever the Yelp sales people say, don’t sign up for paid advertisements unless you are certain that your community is sufficiently Yelping. There are only two ways I can think of to ensure this:
1) You or another optometrist in your immediate vicinity is already getting a steady influx of the Yelp reviews. By steady I mean two or three over a long period of time. Despite being active in the community and signing up for the paid ads I haven’t had a new review on Yelp six months.
2) Find out if your neighborhood has a Community Manager (CM). The Community Manager is the person that drives Yelp in that area. It is a pretty sweet gig – they get paid a decent salary to go to social media events and talk up Yelp and local businesses. But what you need to know is that Yelp only puts CMs in areas that they feel are going to be successful and they do absolutely nothing for any other community to develop business. I was told that Tampa had a CM, but we didn’t. So if you can’t meet with the CM, then don’t sign up to pay. It is a pretty good bet that if you do not have a community manager in your city you will be throwing away your money.
One more note: Be skeptical with what Yelp promises to make the sale. I was promised by Yelp that if we signed up for paid ads we would come up in the Tampa search listings. On fortunately this simply is not true - see Tampa Optometrists search results here. Oh well.
Finally, just so you don’t get the wrong idea – I’m not anti-Yelp. I’m anti-wasting time and money. If you are interested in Yelp and can find one of the two points above, then go for it. Until then, use it for free and let me know how it goes.
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