Yes.....Don't do it. Absolutely a horrible experience. Complete waste of money and time.

They are the biggest scam going IMO.

 

The internet is becoming filled with all these type of services.

 

I have the top position in Yelp for "my town electrician". Yelp also comes up on the first page of results when searching for "my town electrician" in Google. I never paid anything, I just registered with Yelp for free and setup a company profile.

 

i agree with hackster....i am also on the top. The rule is to always analyze your cost to benefit ratio. if your already at the top for just signing up there is no need to pay for anything. I just turned them down recently.

In my opinion, the only way to pay for anything is for location specific placement. In other words search engines use your location of business for relevancy. So if you want to show up in another city then i feel its justified.

Hope this helps,
Mike

 

SEO (search engine optimization) is good and may be something to invest in but there are no guarantees you'll get up to the top of Google by paying for Yelp.

 

they (yelp) called me once when i was very new. i was charged over $300 for one month of pay per click and never received one call. don't pay anything to them.

 

lol Yelp. Isn't that the sound Scooby Doo makes when you step on his Rawls?

Your on my Rawls! Your on my Rawls!

There good for a free backlink but other then that all they are doing is managing a pay per click campaign and there really not that good at it.

 

I get calls all the time. Asking if I would like some jobs doing panel upgrades in my area. They then say that I have to pay xx amount for everyone that they send me and that is before I have even meet the customer. So if the customer backs out they still get paid. Don't sound like that good of a deal to me. I also show up first for electrician searches in my area and some surrounding areas.

 

Thats not Yelp.

 

I think my listing was free. My seo guy handles all that.

 

Nothing wrong with having a free Yelp listing but giving them money for what you will receive will be a waste.

 

I am pleasantly surprised

I have to say, in the beginning, I was 110% against Yelp. I swore up and down I would never PAY them a dime, for two reasons really. First, I didn't understand their review filter process, and thus, I hated it. Second, you do not have to be a qualified EC to use their services. Anyone who can create a business entity, in whatever fashion their local laws dictate, can advertise on Yelp. Yelp does not require them to distinguish themselves differently if they are not properly licensed. As a matter of principal, I hated that fact.

HOWEVER, After about the third or 4th call I got from their sales people, I went ahead and signed up for one year of their lowest tier of advertising. I have to tell you, only three weeks into it, I am GLAD I did, and it has already paid for itself for 6 months. Like I said, I've only been signed up for three weeks. Basically, if everything continues that way, In another month or so, I'll have paid for it for the year, and I'll have 10 more months that is all "extra".

A couple of things that I felt were very eye-opening during their sales pitch were the demographics of yelp users, studies that have shown what the average revenue increases are after signing up, and the "relevance" of Yelp today.

First, the demographics. She asked me who I thought used Yelp. I took a guess of 18-25 year olds. I was wrong. Very wrong. Their main demographic is 25-34 year-old college graduates with an annual income of $150,000 or more. THAT is the kind of client I want! Go here and see for yourself:
www.quantcast.com and search for yelp.com

As to the relevance of Yelp, considering it is being integrated into many smart phone search processes, and that people are moving to mobile devices to "search" Yelp is in reality a front runner when it comes to consumers looking for a place to spend their money. The best part is, consumers who go to Yelp typically go their when they are ready to spend money, meaning less bottom feeders and tire kickers. Just as a demonstration, to see what service consumers are using based on web traffic, check this site out:

Comparison, based on national web traffic, between Yelp, Angies List, and SuperPages, 2005-Present. It's pretty interesting. AngiesList always did poorly. Until Yelp showed up, SuperPages was doing very well. Yelp has taken over. The question is, how long will you wait before you accept the fact that a LOT of people use yelp, so you might as well look as good on it as possible?

 

I have to say, in the beginning, I was 110% against Yelp. I swore up and down I would never PAY them a dime, for two reasons really. First, I didn't understand their review filter process, and thus, I hated it. Second, you do not have to be a qualified EC to use their services. Anyone who can create a business entity, in whatever fashion their local laws dictate, can advertise on Yelp. Yelp does not require them to distinguish themselves differently if they are not properly licensed. As a matter of principal, I hated that fact.

HOWEVER, After about the third or 4th call I got from their sales people, I went ahead and signed up for one year of their lowest tier of advertising. I have to tell you, only three weeks into it, I am GLAD I did, and it has already paid for itself for 6 months. Like I said, I've only been signed up for three weeks. Basically, if everything continues that way, In another month or so, I'll have paid for it for the year, and I'll have 10 more months that is all "extra".

A couple of things that I felt were very eye-opening during their sales pitch were the demographics of yelp users, studies that have shown what the average revenue increases are after signing up, and the "relevance" of Yelp today.

First, the demographics. She asked me who I thought used Yelp. I took a guess of 18-25 year olds. I was wrong. Very wrong. Their main demographic is 25-34 year-old college graduates with an annual income of $150,000 or more. THAT is the kind of client I want! Go here and see for yourself:
www.quantcast.com and search for yelp.com

As to the relevance of Yelp, considering it is being integrated into many smart phone search processes, and that people are moving to mobile devices to "search" Yelp is in reality a front runner when it comes to consumers looking for a place to spend their money. The best part is, consumers who go to Yelp typically go their when they are ready to spend money, meaning less bottom feeders and tire kickers. Just as a demonstration, to see what service consumers are using based on web traffic, check this site out:

Comparison, based on national web traffic, between Yelp, Angies List, and SuperPages, 2005-Present. It's pretty interesting. AngiesList always did poorly. Until Yelp showed up, SuperPages was doing very well. Yelp has taken over. The question is, how long will you wait before you accept the fact that a LOT of people use yelp, so you might as well look as good on it as possible?

I did the year contract on Yelp. I was starting to get a lot of calls from Yelpers and thought I might spring for the advertising. It seems as soon as I did, the calls dropped off.

Maybe it is coincidence, probably is, but it just didn't work for us. For me though that wasn't the worst of it. The company was the worst. They were not easy to deal with, in fact, they were quite the opposite. They made things very very difficult for me.

I would not use them again.....that said, I never wanted to move to the town I live in....been here going on almost 7 years now!:whistling2:

 

When searching for "mytown electrician" in Google, Yelp comes up on the first page (as well as my own website, of course).

When you click on the Yelp result, my company is the first listing.

Yet I get no calls from customers who found me thru Yelp.

 

I hate yelp. We have 28 reviews, most 5 stars. All but 2 are filtered. They leave up one from 2008 and another from 2011. Everyting else stays filtered even from "yelpers" with lots of reviews. Tried thir ppc. Nothing. I pay $75/month to keep competitors adds off our page. Waste of money. Id pay them more but still think theyd filter our reviews. Hate hate hate them. I suppose if they showed our reviews i might feel differently.

 

Why do they filter your reviews?

 

They have some top secret system that no one can know about, this system is the review filter machine!

They won't really tell you why a review is filtered. We have filtered reviews as well. When I paid I did not have one filtered review, but as soon as I stopped, the reviews started to be filtered. Coincidence? :whistling2::whistling2:

 

How do they explain it? That seems so odd, to have 28 reviews and only 2 are visible.

If they ever called me I would tell them straight up that their review filtering seemed corrupt so I would never use them.

 

They wouldn't care. I haven't seen that bad of a scenario, 28 vs. 2, but for someone starting out, 3 viewable vs. 3 filtered can present a problem.

I think it may also affect how you are placed on the search, so it may drop you further down in their rankings. I have nothing to back it up though, and I am sure they won't tell you that either.

 

They are beyond corrupt. There was a big lawsuit which they won. They dont care. They do seem to strongly favor smaller businesses. A brand new one man shop has a better chance of their reviews showing from what ive seen.

A lot of people look there for services so getting reviews cant hurt. Maybe theyll show them and maybe they wont.

The first line of our company description tells people to scroll to the bottom and how to view the filtered reviews.

 

I hate yelp. We have 28 reviews, most 5 stars. All but 2 are filtered. They leave up one from 2008 and another from 2011. Everyting else stays filtered even from "yelpers" with lots of reviews. Tried thir ppc. Nothing. I pay $75/month to keep competitors adds off our page. Waste of money. Id pay them more but still think theyd filter our reviews. Hate hate hate them. I suppose if they showed our reviews i might feel differently.

Jim, you have 15 filtered, and 2 visible. Of the filtered reviews, almost all of them have only written one review....for you. One of the criteria that yelp uses in deciding what gets filtered and what doesn't is how active the reviewer is. When someone signs up, writes a review, and is never heard from again, yelp interprets that as a friend or acquaintance who was doing you a favor by signing up and writing a review.

I "verified" this by contacting one of my clients who wrote a review for me. It was the only review she had written, and within a few days it was filtered. I contacted her and explained that her review was filtered because she had no other activity. She then wrote a few more reviews of other local places (restaurants, etc) and within a week or so the review for me reappeared. I wouldn't suggest doing this for all of the filtered reviews, but this particular client was also somewhat of a friend.

Further verification can be had by my one currently filtered review. It's from an HVAC contractor I work for. He signed up and wrote a review for me on the same day, and hasn't written another since. His was just filtered a few days ago.

The best way to "help" a review not get filtered is as soon as you see a new one, especially if the reviewer has written very few other reviews, leave a comment on the review. This helps the system know that it's legit.

Basically, if a reviewer has only left one review, they have no yelp "street credit", and until they become more active their review will remain filtered. BUT THEY DO COME BACK.

 

This is better information than Yelp will give you, and to me that is the problem. They do not communicate enough with the people who receive reviews to assist them, they only care about the paid advertising that they receive.

Thanks for the tip!

 

That's why I lost a couple reviews off of Google+ that were there for months, because the people (me :whistling2 never signed back into the accounts ever again :thumbup:

 

I hate this stuff......As I keep thinking about this, it just bugs me more and more.

Yelp, Angies List, Home Advisor, Yellow Pages, Hands in Your Pocket, Etc.......

They all have pros and cons to them. They can all bring you good clients and bad clients. They all have shi*y customer service for the contractors, and most likely for the consumer as well.

But you know....There are a lot of guys making not only good money for themselves off of these sites, but making a good solid reputation as well.

It is a little like the T&M vs. FR argument. Some things are going to work for some guys, and it's just not going to work for the rest of us. It sucks, but that is the plain simple truth. One guy can be the best electrician in the world, but never make a dime. The next can be an average guy and just get by. The last guy is the worst out of the three, and he makes an a** load.

None of it makes sense, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of it at times. I almost think you need to test out everything for yourself and see what works for your personality, your business type, your client base, your GC's, your wife (just thought I would throw that in), and I ran out of stuff, but....who cares, I'm already over the three something or other rule!

Point is, all our advice should be taken with a grain of salt.:thumbsup:

 

Thanks Ben. Don't know why I thought there were more. I have commented on the reviews in the past like you said because someone said it would help. With the exception of the one fired employee they are all real customer reviews.
7 of the 15 filtered reviewers had left only 1, but the rest had more than 1 review on yelp. There are a couple with 2-4 reviews but we don't have any from people with dozens of reviews.

Once you are in with the "yelper" community and have lots of people who do a lot of reviewing it probably helps but getting there has not happened for us.

When I look at the local companies that have a lot of reviews showing ,they have reviews up from customers with low numbers but I did notice that more of their filtered reviews had lower numbers. Still the ratio of 2 to 15 really aggravates me. They told me that advertising would not make our reviews show up. I have heard that sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't.

I think if you can get in with that crowd you'll get a lot of business. They do great in search and lots of people look for companies with lots of reviews.

 

One thing that I have found that helps to get reviews is to create a signature for my email account. This makes it so that every email I send to my clients says "We're on Yelp! Click here to submit a review!" which is a clickable link. This way they are always passively reminded about the review opportunity. It's gotten me from 1 review to 5 (6 including the one filtered review) pretty quickly.

What I realized is that love it or hate it, people are very quickly starting to use Yelp more and more, and it's a matter of jumping aboard or being left behind. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I'm halfway to paying for the entire year only three weeks into it, so it's working well so far.

 

Good job! My mom lives in Simi, I'll refer you to her. I'm tired of driving down there!:laughing::laughing:

 

At one time we had 40+ positive reviews on Yahoo, and when they turned it over to Yelp, they freaking deleted ALL our reviews!!!!! Apparently we were not the only ones this happened to, there where a LOT of people pissed over the whole ordeal. That is not the worst of it, we sent out a email blast to our customers explaing to them what happened and asked if they would be kind enough to leave us a review on Yelp also. Over the next few days 20 or so of our customers signed up on Yelp and left us a new review. Well guess what? Yelp freaking deleted all of them as well because they got so many in such a short time. They were actually legit reviews and Yelp deleted them because they said that they were probably some sort of Span or something. I can't stand Yelp to this day and refuse to give them any of our business!! They are constantly harassing us for business too. Good luck, but in my opinion they are un-ethical as hell!!

 

Read this... http://observer.com/2015/03/yelp-ex...emely-concerned-about-what-investigative-documentary-will-reveal/#ixzz3VXVogfWy

 

My impression is that Yelp is fairly honest, though not saints. They get to ask for your business—as businesspeople don't we all do that?—and we get to say no and don't call me again for a while. My general take on them is to make sure you get control of your business entry—this lets you keep it correct and up to date. (This also applies to Google and Bing. I am not sure how Angie's List works.) Yelp corporate says that the only thing that buying an ad does is put it at the top of search results. Their telephone agents are reported to say other things; so far no-one has proven the telephone agents are telling the truth.

 

It was not yahoo that deleted all the legitimate reviews. My customers did actually sign up, create an account and leave a review. Also yelp will not conceal a negative review. I can't stand them.

 

We have several restaurant SEO customers and they find the free listing on Yelp very beneficial; for our contractors and professional service customers Yelp doesn't seem to have the same impact. Just our experience.