Manually monitoring searches for your business on Google can help you catch negative content that you otherwise might have missed. This aspect of online reputation management is one way to mold how customers, clients, or patients think about your business. Unfortunately, recent monitoring of online searches may have revealed that you’ve lost Yahoo Local reviews.
What Exactly Happened?
The Yelp/Yahoo partnership is what seems to have caused the issue with reviews disappearing for some businesses. For some companies, years of hard-earned reviews are now nowhere to be found.
Colonial Hardwood Flooring of Lexington, Massachusetts is one such small business. Colonial says it had managed to develop “six years of mostly positive feedback” on its Yahoo Local listing. Today, all you can see is a single Yelp review posted on February 14, 2014.
According to Colonial’s owner, “it’s a slap in the face that they took all those reviews down overnight.”
Why This Matters:
Numbers don’t lie. Let’s review the statistics.
“79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.*”
“A one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue.^”
“73% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more.*”
Online reviews provide potential new customers, clients, or patients with an initial feeling about whether they can trust your business or not as well as the ability to compare you with your competition. Every time someone looks you up and either doesn’t trust you or finds somebody else with better reviews, you lose new business that could have been yours.
Monitor your reputation today and check to see if your Yahoo Local Business Listing has lost reviews. If you haven’t done so already, claim or create your Yahoo Local listing today. If you find that your listing was stripped of reviews, connect with me via e-mail or on social media and your story might make it into the Matador Solutions blog!
