Yelp for Business

Review by eFreeware

A local business can live or die on what shows up when someone searches for it, and for a lot of people that search starts on Yelp. The awkward part is that the person who actually runs the place may not have an easy way to keep the page accurate. Yelp for Business is Yelp's own answer to that problem, built for owners and managers rather than for customers browsing restaurants.

It comes from Yelp, Inc., the company behind the consumer review site, and it is free to install. The app has been around since December 2014 and sits in the Business category, with more than a million installs and a 3.7 average across roughly 12,300 ratings. That mix of age and a middling score tells you something useful: this is a working tool with a long life and a user base that has not been universally delighted, which is worth keeping in mind as you read what it offers.

Claiming the page is the starting point

If your business is not on Yelp yet, you can create a page at no cost, and if it is already there, you claim it as the owner or manager. Once that is done, the app becomes the place you keep the details straight: phone number, address, website, opening hours, service area and whatever you are currently offering. Photos can be uploaded too, which matters more than it sounds, because the first impression a searcher gets is usually visual.

What I like about framing it this way is that the app is not asking you to build something from scratch. The audience already exists. Yelp says it draws more than 90 million visitors a month looking for restaurants, home services and similar businesses, and the pitch is simply that your page should be accurate when one of them arrives. That is a modest promise compared with most marketing apps, and a more honest one.

The app is explicitly intended for owners and managers claiming a business page, not for people looking for somewhere to eat. That distinction is worth holding onto, because everything else in the app follows from it.

Reviews, messages and the day-to-day replies

The part most owners will open the app for is communication. You can set notifications so that new leads do not slip past, read and answer customer messages and requests, and respond when someone posts a review. For a business that gets a steady trickle of inquiries, having that in one place on a phone is the difference between answering the same day and answering next week.

The app also covers requests to schedule appointments or provide quotes, which points at trades and service businesses as much as restaurants. Booking is handled through Yelp reservations, so patrons can reserve through your page. Customer support is included, which is a small thing to note but a real one when you are trying to work out why a listing is behaving oddly.

None of this is exotic. It is the plumbing of a business page, and the app's value is that the plumbing is reachable without sitting down at a desktop.

Advertising and the tools that come with it

Yelp Ads is a separate paid service, pitched as a way to reach three times as many customers. I would treat that figure as a marketing claim rather than a guarantee, since results depend entirely on your category, your area and how much you spend. What the app does provide is tools for managing a business page: you can update your details, respond to reviews and messages, and keep track of your page from one place.

Beyond the page itself, the app includes a business suite of tools and the ability to add more businesses as you grow, which suggests it is meant to scale with an operator rather than serve a single storefront forever. That is a reasonable design for someone running two or three locations, though it does mean the app's surface area is larger than a simple listing editor.

Restaurants, salons and the partner tools

Two verticals get specific treatment. For food service, the app connects with delivery partners named as GrubHub, ChowNow, EatStreet and Delivery.com, and it points to Yelp Guest Manager for waitlist, reservations, table management, to-go orders, analytics and dedicated support. There is also a guestbook feature with two-way SMS and exportable data for marketing campaigns, which is the sort of thing a restaurant with a regular crowd would actually use.

For beauty and hair services, the app works with salon scheduling partners such as Booksy, Vagaro and Booker so clients can book appointments online. If you are in either of these categories, the app is doing considerably more than editing a page. If you are not, those sections are simply not relevant to you, and the core listing and messaging features are what remain.

What it asks of you

The app itself is free. The costs sit elsewhere, and the app is the front door to those, not a way around them.

The other requirement is attention. Notifications, messages, review replies and ad tracking only help if someone actually checks them. A page that is claimed and then ignored is arguably worse than one that was never touched, because customers will assume the silence is the business's answer.

There is also the matter of who the app is for. It is built for owners and managers, and anyone wanting the consumer side of Yelp should use the separate Yelp app instead.

How I would approach it

I would start by claiming the page and getting the basics right, because that work costs nothing and pays off immediately. Phone number, address, website, hours and service area first, then a handful of good photos. Those are the fields a searcher actually uses to decide whether to call or walk in, and they are the ones most often left stale.

From there, turning on notifications and answering messages and reviews promptly is the next step, and it is the one that changes how the business looks to strangers. Only after that would I think about paid promotion, and then with a clear sense of which neighborhoods are worth targeting and a habit of checking the results rather than setting them and walking away.

If you run a restaurant or a salon, it is worth looking at the partner integrations before deciding how much of your booking workflow belongs in Yelp at all. Doing everything in one place is convenient, and this app concentrates on the owner's side of a Yelp page.

A page manager for owners who will use it

Yelp for Business is a free, focused tool for the person responsible for a business's presence on Yelp. The 3.7 average across those 12,300-odd ratings suggests plenty of users have found friction somewhere, and the app is not going to manage your reputation for you; it just puts the controls within reach.

I would suggest it to owners and managers of local businesses that already get found through search and want to answer customers without opening a laptop.

This app suits the person who owns or manages the page, and it concentrates on that side of Yelp. For everyone else, it is a straightforward install with no cost attached to the parts that matter most.