What do you like best about Yelp for Business?
Pages are relatively easy to manage to add information about your business.
In theory it's a nice simple way to advertise for a business.
If you have enough profit for advertising; it's possibly worth it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Yelp for Business?
Billing Practices -- they create promotions that are difficult to understand if they are enabled or not.
Features that are stupid to bill for. As a general contractor; you have to pay $ each month to have a checkbox on your landing page that indicates you're a "License Verified" contractor. You can't be a General Contractor without being licensed, bonded, and insured in Washington State. however, the absence of that information makes you look like a shady business on Yelp (relative to your peers). So, yes -- you can "have a free page" on Yelp ... but you really can't if you're serious about having an online presence. And that pay-to-play model only benefits Yelp -- not the consumer, and not the business.
Yelp's pricing model isn't pay-for-performance. You pay an arbitrary amount that you pick -- and the spend recommendations are basically a UI that claims other businesses like yours spend X per month. It's a good strategy for them to make money, but a bad strategy for a business to actually get real leads from -- or to even know what your cost-per-lead will be.
Quality of leads - All except one lead from the last two years on Yelp were trash. But, for us -- we only needed one good lead to justify the spend. Most calls we got through Yelp were Tire-kickers who weren't actually buyers for the most part -- mostly people in the "research" phase of their buying journey in the remodel space. We found that we got better leads through carefully designing ad campaigns on Google and Microsoft for our industry.
TL;DR;, Your Mileage May Vary -- but don't expect it to feed your business in the remodeling space.
A lot of little things they do as "features" cost you monthly and you're nickle-and-dime'd on really basic functionality that costs them nothing and should be included as a basic feature already.
Custom Support is also disempowered to actually help you. We repeatedly saw positive reviews from our customers on Yelp and then within 24-48 hours of receiving a review and thanking our customer, Yelp's automation would claim they were fraudulent. (for scale; we had like 6 reviews in total as a small local remodeling business; only one was approved. All were 5*). This isn't exactly what others claim where people get lots of negative reviews and yelp doesn't help them -- I wouldn't expect them to anyways; if you're providing crap work and getting crap reviews, you earned them. For us it was just frustrating to be on a job-site for upwards of a month for a great customer who would kindly write a review only to ask us "where did the review go I just wrote?".
This was incredibly frustrating when we worked hard to earn a positive review from a customer. We got to the point that we now explicitly began tell our customers, "If you're going to write a review, please do so on any platform other than Yelp because they are just removing reviews and we don't know why" -- possibly it's because our crews were on-site at a customer residence making the algorithm think we were generating them or something (e.g., co-founder has the yelp app and it sees location --- hard to say) ... but the review review process is fundamentally broken. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
