Have you heard of Yelp?  Most have not, but among a few early adopters, Yelp has a cult-ish following that is about to become mainstream.

Yelp is like any other yellow pages site, with one big difference: there are heaps upon heaps of reviews of just about any kind of consumer oriented business that you (or your potential customers) may be looking for.

Curious about where to eat in an unfamiliar city?  Yelp will help you separate the hole-in-the-wall hidden gems, from the just plain holes.  I have driven by this restaurant hundreds of times, but I have never thought to try it.  After seeing the reviews, I’ll be sure to check it out next time I am around.

Upon reading this, you may have searched for your own business on Yelp, and hopefully you liked what you found.  However, unless you are a restaurant, it is unlikely that you have any reviews at all!  Yelp has yet to catch on in the same way for other service businesses, but with its strong community atmosphere and steady growth it is only a matter of time.

At this point, this lack of reviews for you and more importantly for others, can be used to your advantage.  If you are the first one on the block (or the page) to get a few good reviews, why should a searcher go anywhere else?

Now, I wouldn’t be singing Yelp’s praises quite so strongly if it only helped businesses get found by searches on Yelp itself, but it does not.  It does far more than that.  Nowhere in the foreseeable future, will major search engines like Google not be a very significant force in determining where consumers spend their money.

The great news is, search engines love Yelp.  Any review of your business on Yelp will become a part of your ever important local listing on Google.  In locally targeted searches like “South Elgin Dentist,” Yelp’s local list is often the first result, providing an awesome opportunity for exposure if you are one of the few businesses in your area with some good reviews.

Search engine results for "South Elgin Dentist" with Yelp at the top. (Click to enlarge.)

Now that you know about Yelp, would you like me to boil this down to two actions you should take right away to expand your web presence through Yelp?  Okay!

Step 1 — Make sure your business is listed on Yelp and claim it.  Go to Yelp’s business center and search for your business.  If you see it, great—select it and complete the confirmation process.  Update your business’s listing and all relevant details.  If you can’t find your business, Yelp will guide you through the process of creating a listing for your business.  Your listing will appear almost right away, but you will have to wait 60 days to claim your listing.  But you can still move on to step 2 in the mean time.

Step 2 — Encourage your customers to write some reviews!  There are lots of ways to do this, which I have already discussed in this article about how to get your customers to review you online.

That should give you something to work with.  If you hit any stumbling blocks just post a comment right here!

Craig