I Hated Yelp… Until It Made Me $115K Last Month

Last month we helped an H vac contractor make $115,000 from Yelp ads for a 12x return. And in this video I'm going to break down eight strategies that actually work so that way you don't have to waste a bunch of money on Yelp for no return. When I was in the trades at a 3 million dollar home service business, I hated Yelp. They would call me all the time and tell me there's searches in my area and I need to increase my Yelp spend. And I thought, well you're just hiding my reviews and you just want to show my reviews so that I spend money. And it was this whole Ponzi scheme of ratings and reviews to hopefully get some leads that I could never attribute because attribution wasn' there. And what I realized was I was not the only person that felt this way. Most home service businesses hated Yelp. Actually now we had a client that we asked and they said that their password was Yelp sucks. So I get it. Yelp is not something that people like. However it works. And in this video I'm going to break down how I solved the Yelp Rubik's Cube to generate a 5x and 10x return for our clients. So you can do the same. One thing that I found was that since so many people hate Yelp, there's actually a lot of opportunity to use Yelp because there's not much competition on there. And like there's two objections that I usually get. The first one people say is, well, who are these Yelp users? They're probably live in a condo or their parents basement and there aren't they just looking for restaurants to go to eat at. And the results would actually surprise you. Let me pull up this report. So this report is all about Yelp and you can see founded 2004, they IPO'd in 2012 based outta San Francisco. But the real stats that I wanna show you is who are the users of Yelp from this report. So you can see the Yelp user demographics here. Now most people think that they're young people that are Yelp users. Well in reality 39% of users are 55 and above. That is very surprising for most people. The second thing over here is that Yelp users by education you can see that 62% of them went to college. So they have a college degree. They're not just college dropouts living in their parents basement. And the last one over here you can see is Yelp users by income. And this one is shocking for Most people, and that is that Most Yelp users, 56% of them make over $100,000 or more. So these are people that are 55 and above, have a college degree and make over $100,000. Most home service business owners are going to say, that's my target audience that I want to. The second objection that we get is that, well, are these people literally on the Yelp app looking for this stuff or how do they actually find us? Here is what they're doing. They're going to Google, they're typing in H vac service in whatever city. They're getting the normal Google results here. But if you notice in the actual search engine results section down here, the eighth result is Yelp and it's the best 10 heating and air conditioning contractors and you go to that and that is the Yelp result. So people are starting their search on Google and ending up on Yelp. The other thing that's very noticeable about this is that Yelp is the default for for a lot of platforms. Bing, for example, is the Yelp default. The other thing is if they default for Amazon, Alexa, Apple, Siri, Samsung, Apple Maps, and there's a bunch of APIs into other aggregators. So a lot of times people don't even know that they're looking at Yelp results when they're asking for specific things. And that's a very big point because people are not just going to Yelp looking for H vac service or gutter cleaning. They're ending up on Yelp without even knowing it. And they're reaching out to the business saying, hey, I want to work with you. Which is why it's so much low hanging fruit. So now that I showed you that Yelp doesn't actually suck and your target audience is probably, probably on Yelp searching for your service. Let's look at those eight strategies so that you can get the most money out of whatever you're going to spend on Yelp. The first part of this is setting up your Yelp profile and your ads to make sure that you're getting the most bang for your buck. So the first thing you want to do is go through and optimize your profile. How can you do this? You can add pictures of before and after pictures. If you're running ads, you can set up projects to show specific projects that you've worked on. You can also set up a call to action. This is free. If you pay for ads, you can set up what's called a request a quote feature, which we'll talk about in a second. But you want to go through and make sure that your hours are set up. You have owner messaging, you have about the business. Basically, go through your entire Yelp profile and make sure that it's set up correctly. Inside of these things, you want to make sure that you have keywords. So, about the business, don't just say, we've been in business since 1995. Talk about the services that you offer, the location that you offer them in, maybe your team size, maybe a little bit about why you got into the business. Try to spend a little bit of time because Yelp is indexing anything that you put on their platform to show you for results. Here's an example of a business that's fully optimized. All right, so the first thing you can see, they have nice before and after pictures here, talking about the different services that they offer. So people can see right when they come to their profile, hey, they do this service since they run ads, you can see that they have different highlights that they selected, which are specific things about this business that are unique. And you can set this up when you run your ads, whatever highlights you want to show. They also have other photos and videos that they've been uploading. You see there's 81 photos. These right here are the portfolios or projects that you can set up that you have to be running ads for. But you can post other before and after pictures right here. Then down here, you can have about the business with a little bit about the business owner. You can have your hours. Obviously, you want to make sure that you set this all up and some reviews. The second thing that we want to optimize, especially if you're running ads, is the Request a quote feature. The call to action is free, but you can't customize it. Request a Quote is a paid feature, but there's a lot of ways that you can customize this to get more leads for your business. For example, if you have online scheduling, you can set that up and you can say schedule right online here. Or you can put a promo in there, like, get 10% off when you call now. And you put a tracking number inside of that specific request to quote. This is going to basically lead people directly to whatever your main offer is to get them to take action. So here's an example of a request to quote. They have online scheduling. They say schedule online here and schedule now. Then you click there, and it goes to your online scheduling. You could also say 10% off. Click here. Get an instant estimate. If you have online Estimating calculator. There's a bunch of different ways to play with this, but the most important thing is that you utilize this to drive leads. And the third thing that you can do to optimize your profile, specifically when it comes to ads, is targeting. So when we look at Yelp ads targeting, what we want to do is go into our ads platform and go to change location. And down here, you can see that Yelp actually has a recommendation to set up specific zip codes or areas here, not just creating like a circle radius around your business. And if you want to get very granular on this, just target the main zip codes that are the most affluent. This is going to get you the best leads, and then you can dial it in from there. One thing that Yelp makes very easy to do is when you set up this location, you can see your audience size is either ideal or not. So you can see right now we're wide open and we can do that. The other thing you can do is optimize your keywords. So let's say that you don't want these specific keywords. You can get rid of them. So that way you're not getting leads for things that you don't actually do. This is something that I would recommend doing on a monthly or quarterly basis just to make sure that it's clean. So that way, way you're getting the leads that you want in the right areas and for the right services. Okay, so those are the three things to optimize your Google business profile, which is basically what everyone is going to tell you to do on any type of YouTube video or when you talk to someone. The next five parts are what drove that Yelp ad success that are going to be unique. But you have to get through those first three parts because they're basically foundational pieces. All right, so let's get into the next five parts that's actually going to drive ad success. And the first one is return on ad spend Tracking the big issue when I was in the trades was that there's very bad attribution to know what's actually coming from Yelp or not. And we came up with, with the system to track return on ad spend from Yelp. So that way we know every single month how we're performing, and here's how we do it. First, we talked about that tracking number, but we want to add a tracking number to our Yelp ads. And inside of our messaging that we're using, we want to add our tracking number so people can call that number. This is going to take care of calls. Anyone that calls us from a Yelp ad is then going to be able to say, hey, this is an actual Yelp ad, so we can track this. The other thing we want to do is if we have landing pages that we're utilizing, we should set up a landing page for our Yelp ad. This is specifically going to drive traffic to our website from our Yelp ads. And if someone fills out that form, we're going to know that this came from a Yelp ad because it came through our Yelp landing page. That takes care of web forms. The last piece to this is, let's say someone just randomly calls us, they go to Yelp, then they go to our website and they click around. Well, you can add a specific message that says, hey, if you found us on Yelp, then you can tell them in a message or any other way on your profile, if you mention yelp, you get $50 off. This allows for extreme attribution, because people are going to want to say that they found us on Yelp so that they get this promo. And again, you can have attribution. Attribution is great, but how are you actually going to track this on a monthly basis? So this is the Google search ads report that we use. And this can be for any platform, Facebook, Yelp, whatever. So every single month, what we do is we want to take all the leads that you get. So all the phone calls, all the messages, all the web forms, and you want to put them all in here. And. And you want to go over here and put how much you spent, the number of leads that you got, how many of them that you actually booked, and then the revenue and of the information that you have over here, you want to go into your CRM, plug in the phone number or the name or the email address, and see happened. Did we have an estimate? Did we actually invoice this information? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, this is a very manual process. So the whole goal is to work with your team so that way they know if you're using a tracking number, you have a whisper message that says, this is a call from Yelp. If they get a web form, the web form says, this is a lead from Yelp. If someone calls in and says, hey, I found you on Yelp, you want them to go into your CRM and put the marketing channel as Yelp. That way you don't have to do this manually. All you have to do is just pull the data every single month and you can see your numbers right here. I spent this much, got this many leads, generated this much revenue inside of my CRM and it's all clean. The problem is that the attribution piece is very hard for businesses and that's why you got to dial in that process. And that leads us directly into the second point, which is you need to have a dedicated team member responsible for Yelp. Not just making sure that attribution is correct, but making sure that they're actually responding to messages. Majority of the Yelp leads that you get, probably about 60 or 70% of them are going to be messages directly on Yelp because Yelp is driving traffic to your page and then saying, hey, message this business business right here. So people are going to be messaging your business and you want to respond to them. The first reason is that Yelp actually puts your response time on your ad to show that this company responds quickly. And if it's under 10 minutes, it's going to say you want to reach out to this company because they respond in under 10 minutes. The other thing is that to get the most bang out of your buck, you're getting leads coming into your business. You need to have someone that's on top of them responding right away. So Yelp recently had this API that could, you could connect and set up an autoresponder. Now they have a zapier integration for an autoresponder which works great but. But all those things are just band aids on top of having a specific dedicated CSR customer service rep or someone salesperson that's responsible for taking leads and booking them via Yelp. The other thing that they can do is then attribute them properly inside of your CRM which helps tie the knot together. One way to also make this a benefit for the employee is to have some type of an incentive. So every single Yelp person that you book, you get a $5 bonus or whatever that looks like. This will get some buy in from them. If it's after hours, weekends or in their normal day to day job, just to make sure that they're looking at the app, they're making sure that they're actually booking people in because they can make money. Nights, weekends, anytime that they want to make money, they can log into Yelp and work these leads. The third way to actually have Yelp ads produced for you is to make sure that you're using a tracking number. I can't stress this enough. The main reason I put this as another point is because Yelp has a built in tracking number that they give to every single Yelp Ad the problem is that the attribution is terrible because it doesn't show you the actual phone numbers that people people call from because they can't they actually exit out. They only show you the last four digits. You want to use your own tracking number because then you get the real data of the actual phone number from people calling you so you can attribute it properly. Don't just rely on the Yelp tracking number, use your own tracking number so that way you can get the actual data out of it. The fourth way to get this is in your messaging. Now I talked about having a dedicated person to message to make sure that they're on top of it. What you want to say is you can say, hey Dan, this is Phil, a technician with Flash H Vac. Is now a good time to talk? That can be your autoresponder right away. And then if they say yes, here's our tracking phone number or hey Dan, this is Phil, a technician with Flash hvc. Is now a good time to talk? Please give me a call here and put your tracking number. This is a great autoresponder message. Another message that you can send is, hey Dan, we can certainly help you. We also have a Yelp promo for $39 service calls at the moment. Can you tell me a little bit more about what's going on? Great starter message that can be autoresponded as well. Another piece to messaging is working your Yelp leads. So let's say that you send a Yelp message but you don't get a response. Well, don't just let the lead die. We talk a lot about lead management plans on this channel. So have a follow up Yelp message that goes out the next day. Hey, were you able to take care of your H Vac problem? Don't just say, hey, do you want us to come out and take care of this? Ask them about their problem again, were they able to solve this or not? You can also send them promos like, hey, we have a promo going on for the end of the month. You can get X, Y and Z if you act now. Now these are leads that you need to be working. If you don't have a plan for managing your Yelp leads or any leads at that matter, it's probably not going to work because without a lead management plan, you're just going to be praying for one call closes or one lead closed. And that's not how this system works. You need to have a good process for managing your lead leads that could be autoresponder. Then a CSR picks it up. Then on the second day we send a follow up message and on the seventh day, we send a follow up message. Working these leads to get them across the finish line. And the fifth thing to get the biggest bang for your buck from your Yelp ads is you should be working with a Yelp ads partner, specifically a marketing company. The reason that I say this is because when you're dealing with Yelp directly, in my opinion, most of the Yelp people are just salespeople. They are not looking at your business. They don't have the specific return on ad spend data from your CRM. All they're doing is saying, spend more money because they're getting incentivized to spend more money. And if you're a Yelp person that's watching this, you know, a lot of it is like, hey, there's so much opportunity to be spending money on Yelp. The problem is for you trying to coach these business owners is that you don't have the return on ad spend data. And that's why I'm recommending that you should be working with a marketing company that's going to produce a return on ad spend number for you so you can make the best decisions for your business and not just shoot blindly at. There's so many people searching in your area. So just spend more money. When you don't have a Yelp lead management plan, you don't have a return on ad spend attribution reporting, nothing in line to help you grow your business by making good decisions by the data that you have. Yelp was actually a part of helping this H VAC business double their revenue in 12 months. And I documented the entire process of their growth in this video. And if that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.