Yelp – A Necessary Evil for Local SEO
For the longest time, Yelp was considered by most to be a great app where people could review a local restaurant or find a handyman that was on the up and up. For many businesses that fall outside the core business categories for Yelp, like law firms, there wasn’t much reason to even consider having a free listing on their platform.
Many business owners, including many restaurants, hate Yelp with the fury of a thousand suns because of their sometimes questionable business practices, good reviews that magically disappear into the “not recommended” bucket, and charging for every small upgrade to a business profile. There’s even a movie about it, and they themselves have only a 2 star rating on their own website out of over 12,000 reviews. Reviews, ironically, they don’t respond to against their own advice. However, this is not a hit piece on Yelp; this article will explore why presence on Yelp truly is a necessary evil when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
Yelp is Not Just a Place to Find a Good Meal
In the world of SEO there are a couple categories for business directories:
- Industry/Niche specific – these are the Avvo’s & Justia’s of the legal world,
- Business Citations – business directories that display your Name, Address, Phone number (“NAP”) and sometimes your website address.
If you’re a lawyer, you’d want to make sure you’re included in high quality directories that contain consistent & accurate business information about your firm. This helps Google validate who you are, what you do and where you’re located.
Over the last 5 years or so, Yelp has morphed into one of the most critical business citations which disseminates business data to other online sources. The business data & reviews collected by Yelp feeds:
- Bing & Yahoo
- Apple Maps
- Alexa voice search
- Siri voice search
- … and a growing list of other software, directories and online services.
Ignoring Yelp means that you are ignoring these and future platforms, which are collectively critical to SEO. Not to mention, you’re also ignoring the most visible review platform in the US currently. If you have a profile on Yelp, even with just a few reviews (or maybe even none), there’s nearly a 100% chance your Yelp profile will be on page 1 of Google when someone searches your law firm’s name.
You’re Fighting a Losing Battle
You can choose to abstain from voluntarily setting up a profile on Yelp, but that’s not a guarantee that your business will be absent forever. In its desire to have comprehensive, accurate information about US businesses, a business profile for your law firm could be created on Yelp without your knowledge and with no legal recourse. Here’s how:
- At some point you may get “aggregated” into the Yelp directory. As business profiles & citations are built on other platforms for your law firm, Yelp will probably, eventually see that you’re a prominent business and may automatically generate a “claimable” listing on the Yelp platform. More info on this from Quora.
- Anyone, can create a business profile for you and submit a review (source). You have no control over this.
- Yelp is unofficially a part of the “EAT” portion of Google’s algorithm (at least in relation to receiving and responding to reviews). Purposely trying to stay out of Yelp will possibly (probably) harm your website’s organic & local rankings on Google.
Ignoring Yelp is a Liability for Your Business

A client is upset with you for one reason or another and they go to rant on Yelp (insert shocked face). They see that your business does not have a profile, they might create one for you using the link above because they’re pissed and they know the power of Yelp. If Yelp confirms that the business information the User created is accurate, Yelp will publish a “claimable” business listing for you, along with the negative review (Yelp has a legal right to do this and has been sued and prevailed many times – your business is public information). Since you don’t have access to the Yelp listing, you don’t know you have a 1 star review. After a week, a month or a year having a 1 star review, you finally learn of it – probably from an employee, colleague, friend or even a new client.
Since you haven’t claimed the Yelp profile you can’t reply, and you can only verify you own the business using phone call verification. During this time, you can’t respond to the negative review and now you have to: 1) race to claim the Yelp profile, 2) reply to the 1 star review and 3) try to get new 5 star reviews to drown out the bad one. If your firm has moved, if you’ve joined another law firm, changed your phone number or lost access to the previous phone number the profile was created with for any reason during this time, the problem compounds because now you can’t use phone verification to claim the listing and respond to the review.
Recent Comments
Doug BradleySays
Hey Jonathan, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. My guess is that you might mean: "wouldn't it be easier…
Doug BradleySays
Hi Karen, Without specific examples I wouldn't be able to tell you. However, Google does *tend* to deliver more recent…
Doug BradleySays
Hey Barbara, the assumption that this was limited to only 4 digits is not by me - that's just the…
MichaelSays
Hey Scott. Same Michael posting as before that you replied to. My post already implicitly addressed this when speaking about…
Barbara NicholsSays
Your assumption regarding the 4 digits and the algorithm's seemingly limitation was just busted. We posted 10,000 and the results…
KarenSays
I get the gist, but can someone please explain why the dates on the search results are almost always from…
Doug BradleySays
Thanks Michael. I try to approach the comments carefully because there are a lot of people who just plain don't…