Authored By: Tiffany Orth
Whether you are looking for a dentist or searching for a new restaurant to try, you probably have used Yelp reviews to help make your decision. With an estimated 72 million unique visitors and over 115 million reviews, Yelp is becoming one to the top sources for consumers. Just this year, Google launched an update which highlights local reviews that includes Yelp reviews displayed on search results.
So, what does this mean for your law firm?
In a recent article, Gyi Tsakalakis of Lawyerist.com shares how this popular review source may “play a role in the initial impressions formed by potential clients.” Below are a few of his tips to monitor and manage your law firm listing:
- Claim Your Law Firm’s Page: “Be particularly careful to list your name (firm name), address, and local phone number. The consistency of these is critical to ranking in local search results. If your firm has multiple office locations, be sure to claim each additional location page.”
- Yelp Business Owners Dashboard: Yelp business dashboard is “one way to measure the impact your Yelp listing is having on your client development efforts.” This dashboard will allows you to see user views, activity feed and customer leads. You can also track your referral traffic from Yelp in Google Analytics.
- Review Yelp Guidelines: “Yelp has a variety of guidelines for contributing content. Perhaps most notably, Yelp strongly discourages businesses from soliciting Yelp reviews. However you may feel about this policy, you shouldn’t publicly request reviews for your Yelp page. If you do, you put yourself at risk of Yelp taking action on your page, including filtering your reviews.”
(Read the full article, “Yelp for Lawyers”)
“For better and worse, Yelp is likely to play some role in how potential clients form an opinion about you and your practice,” says Tsakalakis. Being proactive and monitoring your law firm listing will help prospective clients get the best first impression.
Photo Credit: dennizn