Yelp and Online Reviews
Figure 37. Claiming your Yelp business listing.
Once you have claimed your business listing, you will have considerable control over the listing’s look and messaging. Add some photos and information about your law practice.
Figure 38. Your claimed Yelp listing.
Sign up for email alerts so that you are notified whenever you receive a positive or negative review. This will give you an opportunity to thank people for positive reviews and to make repair attempts with those who leave negative reviews.
Figure 39. Setting up Yelp email alerts.
What if you have more than one listing on Yelp?
If you have more than one listing on Yelp, it’s a good idea to combine them. The way to accomplish this is to claim each of your listings and notify Yelp that a listing is a duplicate.
Figure 40. Combining duplicate listings in Yelp.
What if you have no listing at all on Yelp?
If you do not find your business listing in Yelp, you can add your business by creating a new business account at biz.yelp.com.
Figure 41. Adding your business to Yelp.
What To Do with Negative Reviews
It doesn’t matter how good you are or how well you did in a case with an unfortunate set of facts and circumstances because occasionally a client is going to be disappointed enough with the result to voice it on a review site like Yelp.
It goes without saying that a bad review that ranks high in search engine results is going to have a negative impact on your online success. Therefore, you need to do everything you can to minimize the potential damage.
The following is what is possible to do in the eventuality of this happening to you.
Whether the review is at Yelp or on some other review site, if the review is libelous, you can write to the editors to have it removed. For example, you may find a review where you do not recognize the author or the circumstances he or she is describing, leading you to a conclusion that it may have been posted by a competitor. Or you may recognize the client, but the review is filled with slanderous falsehoods. Of course, if you recognize the person and they are expressing their constitutionally protected opinions, then you will want to skip to the next section.
Figure 42. Challenging a Yelp review.