Reviews establish credibility. Customers are more likely to trust online reviews over traditional advertising for obvious reasons, who better to ask than those who have knowledge of your business first hand? People turn to online reviews to decide where to eat dinner, what kitchen appliance to buy, where to shop, and which service provider to hire. Within major verticals there are also review sites, but in general Yelp and Google are the two primary tools used. As we look at these two sites when it comes to online reviews and each has their own positives and negatives, but which is better for your business?
Let’s break them down below:
GOOGLE – Everybody knows Google (they also have the majority of local search traffic)
- Google is the most powerful search engine in the world, people use it to find almost everything!
- Google reviews are attached to how Google organizes search results.
- The more activity you have on any of Google’s platforms, the better your business performs in search engine results. Thus, the more reviews you have, the more exposure you receive.
- Google reviews show up everywhere and across many services and sites aside from search engine results.
- Even though Yelp reviews will pop up on a Google search, it’s likely to be 2 or 3 down the line with Google reviews and information posting priority at the top right of the results page.
- Google is better at minimizing spam and sorting out false reviews
Yelp – Geared more toward local businesses.
*Of note, Google tried (unsuccessfully) to buy Yelp at one point
- Yelp acts as a sort of virtual yellow pages where people can go to find out information about a business (hours of operation, location, phone number, etc.).
- Yelp has feature to run ads and specials on the site for customers to take advantage of
- Can pay to advertise your business to show up more frequently on Yelp search results
- Yelp is meant to be used in mobile or tablet form, making it easy and convenient for people to pull up reviews and information.
- Yelp requires that an active user be the one writing a review in order for it to pass through some of its security filters, which means that a happy customer can’t just create a new account, write a review and have it count the same as it would coming from a regular user. Reviews from regular Yelp users carry more weight.
- Yelp’s mobile app is very popular and operates independently from search engines, a feature that many use and appreciate.
Google vs Yelp? The truth is that any positive online review is a good thing regardless of where it’s left. It can be a bit of overkill to ask your customers for reviews in more than one location so take the above information into consideration, decide which works best for your business and send your customers that way.
Want to know more about online reviews? Take a look at this post