It may be a surprise to you but when it comes to the success of your medical practice, Yelp is a big player!

 

Eighty-three million people visit Yelp each month, making it a significant influencer in where consumers spend their money. 

If that weren’t enough, Yelp not only has a dominant presence on the first page of the search engine result pages (SERPs), but can also make or break a business in today’s search-first, act-next world.

Several posts offer tips to encourage people to leave reviews (like this one or this one), but very few (or any) discuss the following tactic that can help a company get more positive reviews to appear on its Yelp profile. The most rewarding part of this tactic, is that the positive reviews have already been left for businesses by their patrons – all a business has to do is give them a little “push” to get them viewable.

For those of you who will say this is a questionable tactic, tell me about it in the comments below, for those of you tired of all your hard earned reviews being filtered by Yelp, you’re going to want to save this post. Let’s get to it.

Finding Your Filtered Reviews

If you scroll down to just below the reviews listed on your profiles you will see a clickable link that says “(x) other reviews that are not currently recommended.” Click on that link and you will be able to see the reviews that have been left for your business that are caught in there filters.

Getting “Votes” for Positive Reviews

In order to get your votes released from the filter, you will need to get people to vote your review as “useful,” and for the sake of appearing natural, a few “funny” and “cool” votes won’t hurt anything either. The issue is, you may not be able to get a bunch of random people to take the time to follow the above steps and vote for reviews other people have left for your business, not to worry, there are a few ways around that.

Regardless of how you choose to get votes for your reviews, there are three elements critical to getting them released.

  1. The votes need to come from unique IP addresses
  2. The votes need to be spread out over several days to look real
  3. Getting some votes from people with active Yelp profiles is very helpful.

Do You Check your Yelp Status?

It’s crucial that you know what people are saying about you.  Negative feedback is important to because it lets you know what you need to improve upon.

Many prospective patients will check your yelp rating prior to making an appointment with you so clean up the account and work towards getting those positive reviews!

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