Online and social media marketing has fast become the easiest and most reachable way to let new businesses become visible to customers all over the world. As the online world is continuously growing, Yelp has gained immense value amongst businesses. This is because potential customers prefer to view and review businesses on websites like Yelp. Yelp is a very helpful and commercial resource for people who prefer to read reviews of business first, before venturing out to it. However, like how every coin has two sides, there are both advantages and disadvantages of using Yelp as an advertiser for your business. Some of the Pros and Cons for using Yelp for business are listed below:

PROS:

  1. Customers do not need to make an account if they just need to view reviews of a particular business. However, an account needs to be set up with Yelp in case the customer wants to leave a review about a particular business.
  2. As of March 2015, Yelp welcomed 142 million unique visitors per month on an average. Thus, in case your business is listed with Yelp, there is a very high possibility that you will gain attention from various people, improving the visibility of your business, and also adding to effective advertising.
  3. If your business is listed with Yelp, any customer will find it supremely easy to reach you. This is because once they find you on Yelp, all your information are listed on it, and thus customers can easily identify and find you.
  4. Yelp has over 78 million reviews, due to which a lot of customers rely on the feedback provided. In case your business isn’t listed with Yelp, customers might move to a competitor firm just because they might assume your services aren’t credible enough.
  5. The service “Yelp Now” provided by Yelp allows customers to view restaurants in a locality, make a reservation, and also order take out or home deliveries.

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CONS:

  1. A lot of the reviews posted will be automatically filtered out by Yelp, saying it is not “recommended.” Most of the reviews that remain unfiltered, however, are the bad ones, which give a business a ranking of less than 2. The reviews are filtered out on the basis of an algorithm, but most people often agree that the algorithm isn’t fooled proof.
  2. If you are getting listed with Yelp, you should be aware of the long and unwanted contracts that they make with ads. This is done because these sponsored ads are their main source of revenue, and can be an absolute wastage of time and money if they are dealt with in the wrong way.

Thus, even though the cons may confuse the owner of a business to get listed, it is better to play safe with Yelp. This is almost solely because of the number of people searching for customer reviews on Yelp that not being listed can be a very big con for your own marketing.

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