Yelp
Why We Chose To No Longer Use Them, Advertise with Them, or Put Efforts Into Our Online Presence with Them
This entire article is dedicated to why we chose to no longer work with yelp. Meaning, no longer paying to advertise with them, and simply not having people leave reviews for us on our yelp profile. We want to make it very clear that this is based on our own personal experience with them. This is in no way here to bash the company or get people to stop using them. We just want to share our story.
Our company was was opened on February 2019, it was created by a son and father that have both been in the construction industry for over 15 years. It was time to reinvent and combined their skills and to do so we rebranded as a family owned, Los Angeles based company. Most accounts were simply transferred over to the new name, but some online profiles required a whole new set up. Yelp was one of them.
We opened a new yelp profile and added all the necessary information to make sure our profile is fully optimized. We knew and understood that it will take time until the profile actually gives us work since it does not have reviews and since there is strong competition for contractors in Los Angeles, some of which had been on the platform for many years.
We decided that our best bet was to start advertising with them for simple things that will get our profile noticed more. We opted-in to the page upgrades and business highlights that made our profile stand out. We paid for about 6 months until the issues began. On a completely random day, a men or women, to be honest we have no idea, decided it will be a fun activity to leave us a 1 star review. We have never met the person, spoke to the person, or had any work done with the person. Yet, they found the time to leave us the following:
We were shocked and upset and insanely called yelp to get their help in the matter. The review was fake, and not only that, it in no way reflected anything that had to do with our work. Yelp advised us to leave a comment, send a message and report the review, and so that is what we did. However, the men or women never answered, never provided us their information and yelp sent us an email saying that they have chosen to leave the review as is since they cannot chose how a person feels. We were irritated, but figured that will be fine considering we have real clients who would be happy to leave us reviews that are true to our company and their experience. Real people that we actually met and did work for. That way the 1 star review will simply balance out with the good reviews.
We decided to stop our advertising with them until we have better rating because we figured it will be a waste of money to advertise with just a 1 star and that once there are more reviews we will opt-in to the advertising again. Yelp agreed and understood and let us cancel our advertising with no problems. It was now time to get our profile better optimized and we put all of our efforts into it.
Just to clarify, we are well aware that yelp clearly states that asking for reviews is a no-no. It is written in their guidelines and it is told on the phone when first setting up the advertising profile, so we made sure to follow that rule. When new projects were complete clients asked us where they can leave us reviews and we simply provided them with the links to do so. Many clients chose to live us reviews both on yelp and other profiles, and thank goodness for that.
So why are we still upset with Yelp you might ask…
We were starting to get excited, our reviews were balancing out and soon we will be able to start advertising again. Right. Not quite. Yelp decided that all of our good reviews should be sent to the “Not Recommended” section of our profile. Confused yet? Yes, well so are we. We contacted yelp multiple times to ask them why this keep on happening. All they had to say was that the reviews go through an algorithm that has no human touch to it and there is nothing they can do to help. To them it seems that the reviews are fake because we are a construction company and we shouldn’t be able to have 2 reviews in the matter of 10 days from each other.
Lets us repeat this, real reviews are shown as fake and have no human touch to them, fake reviews are shown as real and can be monitored by a real human. Great. At this point we started feeling real anger and frustration, but again assured that once we have more reviews it will still be ok. Guess what, we got more reviews. Guess what again, they got “Not Recommended” AGAIN. Soooo….. We stopped putting any efforts into yelp. It was simply not worth it. We had and continue to have dedicated clients that are happy to share their experience and we simply send them elsewhere. The reviews remain and our online presence continue to grow. It has not stopped us from getting any more clients or growing a company but it did stop the constant frustration of dealing with liars and people simply looking to make money off of us.
But our yelp issues did not stop there:
A few months later we saw a message on our Facebook page. It was a screenshot from a Facebook user sharing a post created by the same person on the same day regarding our company. That lovely lady left the following on a closed Facebook group proving that she does not know us, have contacted us, or met with us at any point. We shared this proof with yelp who choose to still ignore it and told us nothing can be done. Yet, again.
We simply find it unimportant to continue to deal with, so if you would like to see what people have to say about us or check out our work, click here, or here, or here, or the image right down here. Enjoy.
