How to Manage Your Yelp Reviews

If there are trends that point out something negative--Ichinose gives the common complaint of loud music playing in a business as an example--that's when to take action to remedy the situation in your business.

Based on Experience

For Annie Decamp, owner of Palo Alto, California-based jewelry business Decamp, tracking her page led her to discover a whopping 8 percent of her sales come from Yelp. That realization caused her to advertise on Yelp in order to get the extras--a link to the Decamp website on her business's Yelp page and a rotating slideshow of photographs instead of a static one.

But for her, it took some experimenting until she found a Yelp subscription she was comfortable with. She signed up for a pricier package but decided to cut back to a lower-cost one in February.

"I would recommend starting with the lowest one. Pay attention and track it for awhile and know how many people are using it," Decamp says.

She recommends starting a customer mailing list, and promoting your Yelp page there as well as in newsletters. "It'll say, 'We're now reviewed on Yelp,' or 'Please review me on Yelp.'"

She and her employees also ask callers where they heard about Decamp. "A lot of times they'll say Yelp," Decamp says. "I think of everything in a marketing sense, so I need to understand where customers are coming from and I need to know what I'm paying for."

Decamp follows through by contacting everyone who's reviewed her business with a thank-you e-mail.

"It's a very personal site. The people that I don't know--I think that's a really big thing for them to take the time to do that."