A customer just told you they’re thrilled. You send the text you always send, with the link, asking for a review.
On Google, that’s exactly right. On Yelp, you have just broken a written policy, and the software is built to catch it.
Same action, same customer, same afternoon. Opposite consequences. Most local business owners run one review habit across both platforms and never find out why half their Yelp reviews vanished into a link at the bottom of the page.
So here’s the order of operations, and it’s simpler than the argument usually gets.
Fix Google first, properly. Claim Yelp and complete it for free. Do not pay Yelp anything until you’ve run the arithmetic at the bottom of this post.
Why Google is first and it isn’t close
For nearly every category, Google Business Profile is the higher return of the two, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste.
The map pack sits above the organic results on a phone, it’s built around proximity to the person searching, and an enormous share of local searchers never scroll past it. A profile that’s complete, active and well reviewed competes there. One that was filled in once in 2022 does not.
Yelp is a destination. People go to Yelp when they’ve decided to use Yelp, which is real traffic and in some categories a lot of it, but it’s a smaller and more specific set of people than everybody typing your service plus a place name into a search bar.
Neither of those is a criticism. It’s a question of where the volume sits.
The Yelp review system, which works nothing like Google’s
This is the part that costs people money through sheer misunderstanding.
Yelp runs automated recommendation software that decides which reviews are displayed and counted. By Yelp’s own account, roughly three quarters of reviews on the platform are recommended. The rest go to a “not currently recommended” section reachable from a link at the bottom of your page, and crucially they do not count toward your star rating or your review total.
They are not deleted. They are simply invisible for every practical purpose.
Now the policy that catches everyone. Yelp’s content guidelines tell businesses not to ask customers, mailing list subscribers, friends or family for reviews. Anyone. The software actively looks for reviews that appear solicited, and a business caught pushing hard enough can end up with a public consumer alert on its page.
On Google you ask, within the rules. On Yelp you never ask, and you build the conditions instead.
Building the conditions means the things Yelp itself recommends: claim the page, put the Yelp logo or a sticker where customers see it, post real photographs, keep hours and services accurate, respond to reviews you already have. You’re making it easy for an existing Yelp user to remember you, which is different from prompting a stranger to write.
And if you’ve been running one review process across both platforms, go and look at your not-recommended section today. The number of people who discover fifteen genuine reviews sitting there is high.
The free Yelp listing, which almost everybody should do
Twenty minutes, no money.
Claim the page. Correct the category, hours, service area and phone number. Add ten real photographs of the work, the premises and the team. Write the business description in your own words. Turn on messaging only if somebody will actually answer it, because an unanswered message is worse than no messaging button.
Then respond to every review, including the negative ones, in the same register you’d use on any other platform. The response is read by the next customer, not the last one.
That’s the whole free job, and for most businesses it’s the correct stopping point.
When paid Yelp genuinely works
Be fair, because it does work for some people and dismissing it would be wrong.
The categories where I’d take it seriously are dense urban restaurants and bars, and home services in large metros where Yelp still has genuine consumer habit. Somebody in Brooklyn or San Francisco looking for a plumber at nine in the evening is plausibly on Yelp, and Yelp’s own data says advertisers see around 2.5 times more leads than non-advertisers, which is their figure and worth treating as directional rather than as a promise.
The thing to understand before you sign is the billing model, and this is a criticism of the structure rather than of the company.
You pay per click. Calls, messages, quote requests, booked jobs and revenue all sit downstream of that click, and none of them change what you’re charged. Which means your cost per click can look perfectly reasonable while your cost per booked customer quietly becomes indefensible, and the standard dashboard will not show you the difference because it cannot see your calendar.
Published ranges put ad budgets from around $150 a month at the low end to well over $1,000, with an optional upgrade package around $180 a month on top.
The numbers to pull before you renew
This is the hour that matters, and almost nobody does it before the contract rolls over.
Pull these five figures:
Total Yelp spend over the last twelve months. Everything. Ads, upgrade package, anything you pay someone to manage it.
Leads Yelp reports for that period. Calls, messages and quote requests from their dashboard.
How many of those became actual jobs. From your records, not theirs. This is the number the platform cannot supply and it’s the one that decides the question.
Revenue from those jobs. Gross profit if you can get it.
Your cost per booked job from your next best channel. Google Ads, Local Services Ads, referrals, whatever you can compare against.
Then divide spend by booked jobs and put the two cost-per-job numbers side by side. If Yelp is worse and the gap is large, you have your answer and you should have had it a year ago.
One practical warning while you’re in there: check the auto-renewal terms and the notice period before you decide anything. Annual commitments with automatic renewal are common across local advertising products, and finding out you had to cancel thirty days ago is a bad way to learn.
Before lunch
An hour, in this order.
Open your Google Business Profile and fix whatever is stale: hours, services, photos older than a year, unanswered questions. Then work out how you’ll earn reviews there properly, since that’s the platform where asking is allowed.
Then claim and complete the free Yelp listing, and check your not-recommended section to see what’s been hiding.
Then, if you’re paying Yelp anything, pull the five numbers and calculate your cost per booked job.
You’ll either renew with confidence or cancel with evidence, and both of those beat renewing because the invoice arrived.
My notes on SEO cover the wider local picture. If you’d like a second opinion on your own setup, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.