Yelp wants to enhance its data on local businesses. Whenever someone labels one of your reviews as “Useful,” “Funny,” or “Cool,” that’s good (at least as far as Yelp is concerned).įactor 5: Be the first to review some businesses. But even if your humor is the corniest since Roger Moore played 007, I’m tempted to say it doesn’t matter.Īll that seems to matter is whetheryour “community manager” likes your reviews, and whether you get lots of “votes,” or if maybe even a “ Review of the Day.” Which leads me to the next point…. One way to keep your reviews helpful – and sometimes funnier than you’d expect – is to review really boring businesses, which usually makes you dig deep to think about what you can possibly say. But it’s hard to pump out tons of reviews that still manage to be helpful, and it’s even harder to pump out reviews that people (especially a “community manager”) will enjoy. Many Yelpers get into narcissistic amounts of detail that nobody wants to read. I’m not saying to channel your inner Tolstoy. That didn’t even occur to me until I after I reviewed one of my favorite restaurants, which my CM also happens to like and frequent, at which point she sent me a Yelp “compliment” on my review. I suspect this is the only person who nominates “Elite” Yelpers, so if you write a zinger review of a restaurant or some other place your CM likes, all of a sudden you’re on your CM’s radar, and you’re kindred spirits. Particularly places he or she likes and that you like. But there are 7 factors that I’ve noticed (so far): Factor 1: Reviewing some of the same businesses your “ community manager” has reviewed.
So what factors do determine who gets the dubious title of “Elite” Yelp reviewer? Yelp won’t tell you much. Or length or detail: most of my reviews are maybe 2-4 short paragraphs. So even though I’ve never attended the little “Elite Squad” parties, have shown zero interest in becoming part of the “community,” rarely compliment or “friend” local reviewers, and have written only 66 reviews, they’ve kept me around for 3 years now.Ĭlearly becoming an EY doesn’t have much to do with quantity of reviews. Same deal in 2015: only 20 reviews again (purely by coincidence). I kept up the reviews throughout 2014, but only wrote 20 that year. I wrote those 26 reviews in a span of 8 months. It was also a surprise, because although there are people who’ve written hundreds of reviews who aren’t “Elite,” most EYs have written hundreds.īut then I get the nomination email in February 2014, after I’d written only 26 Yelp reviews in 2013 – for a lifetime total of 26 reviews. It wasn’t part of my intended experiment, nor do I have a particular fondness of Yelp. I learned some useful tidbits, like that a 3-star review is more likely to stick than a 5-star (even if written by a new, less-“trusted” Yelper), that the first review of a business is more likely to stick, and that it typically takes about 10 reviews – spread out over several months – for Yelp to stop filtering your reviews.īut things only got interesting once I accidentally became an “Elite” Yelper.
By 2013, I wanted to understand the filter better, mostly so I could help my clients put together a review strategy that didn’t just send perfectly good reviews into the grinder. I’d written a couple reviews on Yelp a few years earlier, before I even knew about the filter, so those reviews never saw the light of day. That’s why in spring of 2013 I started crawling around in Yelp’s guts, as just another local reviewer. I like to support local businesses that I want to stay in business, I love to write, and as an SEO I must experiment every now and then.
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