Yelp for Business Update: Badges and Highlighted Reviews

Yelp added some new tools for Local Businesses that really outdo what other Local Search sites are doing (via). It’s kind of like Google’s Webmaster Central, but for local businesses. Here’s some new functionality from Yelp:

1) Badges that can show number of reviews and/or the star rating from customers.

2) See how many visits your local business review page gets.

3) Add images, slideshows, and announcements to your local business review page.

4) Interact with customers who left reviews.

5) Highlight a “favorite review”, making it more prominent than other reviews.

This reminds me a little of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform where you can claim a search result and customize it a bit to reflect more of what you think your customers would like to see (or that will catch their attention).

Great job to Yelp for putting together a nice system for local businesses, now to get more local businesses on board!

I always like to think about “implications” with new features like this. My first thought is, hopefully Google Maps and Yahoo Local et al. will get on board and up the ante with new features. I like the direction Yelp is going in. The badge is a great way to get customers from a local business’ web site to the Yelp local business listing, encouraging more reviews (if you can get to their website). Seeing what kind of traffic you are getting alone is a fantastic feature. I like the highlighting a favorite review idea as well, although I wonder if its value to a customer goes up or down knowing it is the business’ doing of putting it at the top.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Yelp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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