Why Yelp?

After spending countless hours over the past six weeks speaking with dentists around the country, it is quite apparent to me that dental practices–based on their experiences–either love or hate Yelp. But since Yelp–as this Forbes article points out–is going to be the preferred provider for Apple Maps and the website to power Siri’s search results, you can no longer ignore it.

Yelp started in San Francisco in 2004 as a local search business. This is probably why dentists perceive it as a “West Coast thing”. But since going public in 2005, it has grown incrementally city by city and in the second Quarter of 2012 reported an average of 78 million monthly unique visitors, and 6.3 million of those visitors use a Yelp mobile app. Two of my three kids live in the Boston area and they tell me they search on Yelp all the time. The demographics of Yelp are hard to ignore. According to Quantcast, 64% of Yelp  users are relatively affluent, educated adults with an annual income of 100K or higher.

Dentists report frustration with Yelp because the review process is more difficult than with Google. With Google, the reviews that are posted stay visible and are rarely filtered. There also seems to be a direct positive SEO factor: the more quality reviews posted facilitates higher positioning on their map. With Yelp and their aggressive filtering mechanism, a lot of legitimate positive patient reviews are going to disappear because they are perceived as “one time” reviews. They are not in the spirit of the Yelp mentality which is to try to get reviewers to weigh in and review lots of local businesses. Yelp admits their system is not perfect, but they feel it has proven to be the most effective way to provide useful content for consumers–and to have those consumers continue to use Yelp in very very large numbers.

So unquestionably, because of the filter, you’re going to have to work harder in order to keep your reviews appearing on Yelp. Don’t get frustrated. Your practice must strive to provide exquisite customer service and quality dentistry each and every day. Anything less is unacceptable in today’s competitive market place. Yelpers seem to be more discerning, so if you and your practice are not first rate, you run the risk of a negative consumer review. My good friend Bill Rossi from Advanced Practice Management recently published a great article about what drives patients to write a negative review.  The article is called Unhappy Patients Point of View: Consumer Research.

I would encourage you to view the Yelp site for Dr. Robert Fields in Van Nuys, California. This practice seems to have figured out how Yelp works to its advantage. They consistently come up in first or second position. They do NOT advertise, but because they have what is called an Enhanced Profile (need to average 100 user visits per month), they can pay $75 per month to have Yelp put up a video that shows on their review page. At the bottom of their reviews, please note the number of filtered reviews that Yelp has taken off their page. You can see that most of those reviews are by one time reviewers. For the most part, the ones that stay on their page are done by patients who have written multiple Yelp reviews. But no worries–they continue to work hard to get more reviews and they keep replenishing their page.

It is so important–whether it is with Google or Yelp–to strive to get positive reviews from your patients. The volume and quality of reviews are a major ranking factor in search engine ranking criteria. A recent study showed that 34-46% of online traffic was drawn to the first listing on the page, and 12-29% was drawn to the second result. So being in first or second position is HUGE!

The web world is a tough one. Consumer reviews sites are here to stay. Managing them to your advantage is one of the biggest challenges facing your dental practice.