Up until recently, Yelp for business was just another one of those review websites I was optimizing for clients for the sake of the backlink and to help manage business reviews should any require a response. It was never a priority until late June when Apple announced Yelp will feed its new iPhone Maps application with the release of IOS 6.

Google Places, now known as Google Plus Local, is the local business listing that had been the primary resource for iPhone Maps and of course Google Maps on most other mobile devices. It is an absolute must for good local search optimization. Yelp has a review filtering feature that prevents all the positive reviews from being displayed and for some reason never filters the negative reviews. Not sure what that is all about? Managing your business reviews is vital for small business marketing success and we always recommends you respond to negative reviews, here’s how.

This video shares some of the basics of claiming and editing your business Yelp listing:

The key ingredients for all local business listings are the same for all webpages. You will just need to know what data on the profile feeds these elements …

• The URL
• Title Tag
• Description tag
• Keyword Tag

In Yelp’s case, the Business Name, City and State feed the title tag. Therefore I recommend you use your primary keywords in the business name. Yelp’s customer review team may or maynot accept the name change. For this example, Tobias Design in Hopewell NJ has requested this edit be made.

Tobias Design on Yelp

<title>Tobias Design – Hopewell, NJ</title>

<title>Tobias Kitchen and Bathroom Design – Hopewell, NJ</title>

The description tag is fed by the first 200 characters of the “About This Business” section of the profile. Therefore, allow high traffic keyword phrases, important to your business, fill the first three lines of this section. Be sure to pepper that content with one or two cities or counties that are close by to help with local search efforts.          For Example:

It is always important to complete the profile to 100% completeness. The number of positive views most certainly adds to your “findability” so don’t ignore the power of a positive review. Don’t cheat on this. Yelp will filter reviews if they believe you are trying to manipulate their system.

Let us know how you are optimizing your online listings for mobile marketing success in our comments.

If you are a business owner and don’t have time to do this work yourself, contact us today and we can get this done for you the rightway.