6 Key Incredients to the top Yelp Rankings for Restaurants | Digital Marketing Division of Eden Streams

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Many restaurant owners and managers have mixed feelings about the Yelp app. On one hand, it can be a valuable tool that helps attract customers and boost business. On the other hand, a single negative review can harm their reputation and deter potential patrons. It's a double-edged sword that can either benefit or hurt their business.

We are writing this guide to help you learn how to use the Yelp app's algorithm to your advantage in order to increase sales from both new and repeat customers.

What we'll be covering in this guide:

• Part 1: Don't fall for the "Yelp Ranking Rumor" that suggests paying for better placement.
• Part 2: Understanding the functioning of Yelp and the factors influencing business rankings (6 important factors).
• Part 3: Establishing a strategy to enhance your business's Yelp ranking.
• Part 4: Creating your personalized "Yelp Ranking Engine" within a week, even with a hectic schedule.

Let's dive in.

A frequent criticism from people in the restaurant business about Yelp is that the platform now operates on a "Pay-to-Play" model. This implies that businesses must sign up for Yelp's advertising services or upgraded subscriptions in order to be visible in search results.

Although utilizing the paid options can enhance visibility on Yelp for search queries, it does not play the main role in determining ranking on the platform. The majority of Yelp app users tend to be skeptical of sponsored search results and tend to bypass them in favor of businesses with genuine reviews and high ratings.

Upgrading your business to a paid subscription on Yelp can elevate your search rankings and diminish pesky ads on your listing, but this doesn't guarantee an increase in foot traffic to your establishment.

The key to converting Yelp users into paying customers for your restaurant lies in familiarizing yourself with the underlying mechanics of the Yelp algorithm and leveraging that knowledge to your advantage.

Let's explore the Yelp Algorithm and the key elements it considers when determining the rankings of businesses in keyword searches.

Before you can start taking advantage of how the Yelp Algorithm works to rank your business higher for certain keywords, you need to have a clear understanding of how it works.

Disclaimer: No one outside of a few folks that work at Yelp really know all of the pieces of their ranking algorithm. What we're walking through below is based on our years of experience using Yelp and our results with helping restaurants to rank higher through giving Yelp what it wants. Please note that there are other factors, but these are what we have found that are the most important to climbing the Yelp Rankings fast.

The following 6 factors are the most important:

1. Proximity to Location of the business to the searcher. This is how close a person is to your business when they actually do a keyword search (or how close the location they type into the search box is).
   
   
2. How the Business Categorizes themselves in their profile. When you fill out your yelp business profile, you are asked to pick categories that your business fits into. This is an extremely important step that many businesses overlooking when claiming or setting up their business on Yelp.
   
   
3. The Keywords a Business puts in their Business Description. This is another important factor that you can change instantly that will dramatically impact how Yelp sees your business. When filling out your business' description (think about how you fill out the items in your menu when thinking about this section).
   
   
4. The Keywords people mention in their Reviews. Yelp is largely about what your customer say about you. What they say in their reviews is just as important as the start rating. Getting them to mention certain keywords in their reviews is an extremely important part of ranking for those keyword in the future (we have a whole strategy behind getting customers to talk about certain keywords in their reviews).
   
   
5. The total number of Reviews a Business has. We never ask for reviews on Yelp. Thats actually against Yelps terms of service. What you can do is ask people to check into your business. If you do this strategically, they'll check in and review your business as well. Do it really well and they'll leave you a big positive review.
   
   
6. The Velocity of Interactions (How frequently a business gets reviewed/checked into). This is one of the least talked about factors to ranking on Yelp but it's extremely important. It's not enough to get a lot of reviews and checkins. You have to keep getting them on a regular basis to be seen as active and "alive" to Yelps algorithm. The key to this is making sure that we continually nudge our customers into interacting with us on Yelp.

So how do we use the "6 core factors" above to our advantage? Simple. We build a "Yelp Ranking Engine" inside of our Restaurant that helps us take advantage of Yelps Algorithm (without breaking their terms of service).

Let's talk about how to build that "Ranking Engine".

Remember, we don't ever want to "Review Gate" or ask our customer for reviews on Yelp directly. We want to nudge them in that direction by asking them to "check into" our business on Yelp.

So how do we do that?

We build something that we call our "Yelp Review Engine".

From above, our "Review Engine" looks something like this:

• Step 1: We build a SMS list of our customers by giving away something small, but valuable inside of our business. (Please note that we are not giving something away in exchange for a review. We give something away simply so we can contact our customers later).
  
  
• Step 2: We send them to a specialized optin page while they are eating at our establishment (via table toppers or in store flyers). We also send out business cards with our take out orders with a QR code and link to the optin page.
  
  
• Step 3: We immediately send them the freebie or discount in exchange for the ability contact them later. A few hours after their meal and opting into the page, we send them a special message remind them to check in with us on Yelp and letting them know that it helps us to continue to deliver high quality service and food when they do.
  
  
• Step 4: The leave us a review that contains many of the keyword we need (this is accomplished via the followup messages we send out). 
  
  
• Step 5: As those review start to become frequent, we increase our star ratings and our keyword based ranking on Yelp. That increased visibility sends more customers our way and they go through the same "Yelp Ranking Engine" and it becomes viral quickly.

It all looks a little something like this:

Ok... Now that you understand how we're using technology and a little clever marketing to give Yelp more of what it wants (and we're ranking higher and getting more business because of that), let's talk about how to actually build all of that.

One of the hardest things that restaurant owners and managers face is having to be a master of everything inside of their business. That includes the marketing a lot of the time as well. 

If you have any questions about how to build any of the above you can contact us here with questions and we'd be glad to help via email for free (a rising tide raises all ships). If you'd like some help building your own "Yelp Ranking Engine" and would like use our expertise to implement it immediately, we also have a very affordable package for any restaurant to get started (you can sign up for that here).

We hope this guide helps you tame the beast that is Yelp.