How to Boost Your Yelp Review Score

We’ve all been there – the dreaded Yelp review that takes our business down a star level. We’re panicked and want to make sure that we make the customer happy – so what do we do? Of course, you should have a strategy in place to get in touch with the customer and try to make the situation right but there’s also what you can do about your own star rating – work on getting filtered reviews to appear.

The absolute first step to improving your Yelp score it to take a look at these reviews. Go to your business page and check your reviews section. Scroll all the way down and you will see a gray hyperlink that says “__ other reviews that are not recommended.” Click this hyperlink.

This is review purgatory. This is where Yelp puts the reviews that have been deemed as unreliable. The reasons that a post could be unreliable are countless and the reviews are pulled by an algorithm that sometimes acts like it’s in a bad mood. Most often, though, it pulls reviews from new accounts with no friends or no other reviews.

Now, the review software is a good and a bad thing. It pulls a lot of one-star reviews since you might have someone who had a bad experience create an account just to tell your business off. In addition, it would do the same thing of someone who created an account solely to give you 5 stars. What can you do about it? One of two things.

For the reviews that you want to be added to your page, first, try friending the Yelp reviewer. Sometimes that’s all that it takes. You could ask your employees to, too. You also might want to reach out to the reviewer and let them know that their review isn’t being seen because they’re not terribly active on Yelp. Who knows, they might get to work and start increasing their usage of Yelp which would help get your review published. When you reach out to the reviewer ask them to do the following to boost their engagement with the platform:

1. Add friends
2. Add a profile picture
3. Ask them to “check-in” on their phone

The second thing that you can do is ask a user to edit their review. The idea behind this is that the user has maybe become more active since initially joining Yelp and by updating their review, Yelp will pull it and place it in current reviews, thus boosting your score. You should do this with all five-star reviews.

There, now you’ve done all you can. It should be noted that this is a process and it might not always work, but if it does it will definitely help you boost your score and increase how your business is performing on Yelp.

Of course, if you don’t have time to respond to your reviews, we’re happy to do it for you. Please contact us at 888-353-1484