Managing Yelp and Google reviews: asking, responding, FTC rules

Google Places listings with star ratings now sit above the regular results for most "city plus service" searches, and the ratings pull reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, Insider Pages, Yahoo Local and Google's own users. Yelp passed 20 million reviews this year and is the default for restaurants and services in most metro areas. Angie's List has a growing paid membership for home services. On the phone side, the Yelp and Google Maps apps on iPhone and Android put reviews in front of someone standing on your sidewalk.

The result is that a three-star average with two angry reviews on page one can quietly cost a business a third of its inbound calls, and the owner never sees it happen.

Before you ask for a single review, control the profiles.

• Google Places. Claim the listing at google.com/places, verify by postcard or phone, and complete every field: categories, hours, photos, description, payment types. Make sure the name, address and phone match your website and your Yelp page exactly. Inconsistent data is the most common reason a listing is suppressed in local results.
• Yelp. Claim the business owner account at biz.yelp.com. Add photos, hours, a description and the specialties section. This also unlocks the ability to respond to reviews and to message reviewers privately.
• Citysearch, Insider Pages, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Superpages, Merchant Circle. Claim them once and keep the details consistent. They feed the aggregators and show up in Places.
• Industry sites. Angie's List for home services, TripAdvisor for hospitality, Avvo for attorneys, Healthgrades and Vitals for medical practices.

Set a calendar reminder to check all of these monthly. Listings get merged, duplicated and edited by users more often than you would think.

The rules differ by platform, and the difference matters.

Google Places does not prohibit asking customers for reviews. A card at the counter, a line in the follow-up email, or a short link on the invoice is fine. Reviewers need a Google account, so expect friction.

Yelp explicitly asks businesses not to solicit reviews, and its review filter is tuned to catch what solicitation produces: a cluster of five-star reviews from accounts with one review and no friends. Those reviews get filtered out of the public count and the owner cannot do anything about it. What Yelp allows is telling people you are on Yelp: the "Find us on Yelp" window sticker, a Yelp badge on your site, a check-in offer in the mobile app. The effective approach is to make the listing visible and let regular Yelpers, who are the ones whose reviews stick, find it.

What works on every platform:

1. Ask at the moment of satisfaction, not a week later. The compliment at pickup, the thank-you after the job.
2. Make it a human request. "If you have a minute, a review on Google really helps us. Here's the link." One sentence.
3. Reduce the steps. Put a direct link to your Places page in email signatures and on a simple /reviews page on your site that lists where you can be reviewed.
4. Ask everyone, not only the happiest. A realistic spread of four- and five-star reviews reads as credible; a wall of identical five-star praise reads as bought.
5. Never offer a discount, gift card or contest entry in exchange for a review. See the FTC section below.

A public response is read by hundreds of future customers, not by the one reviewer. Write for them.

Within 48 hours. Speed signals that someone is paying attention.

Thank, acknowledge, fix, invite. Thank them for the feedback, acknowledge the specific issue without disputing their experience, say what you have changed or will do, and invite them to contact you directly with a name and phone number. Four sentences is usually enough.

Never argue, never reveal private details. Do not disclose a patient's condition, a customer's account history or anything that identifies them beyond what they posted. Medical and legal practices have extra confidentiality obligations here.

Take it offline when it is complicated. Yelp's private message to the reviewer is the right place for a refund or a redo. Many reviewers update their review after a genuine resolution; a few remove it.

Respond to positive reviews too, briefly. A one-line thanks shows the page is alive. Do not do it for every single one or it starts to look automated.

When a review is false. Flag it with specifics. "This person was never a customer; we have no record under this name" is far more likely to get action than "this review is unfair." Yelp and Google remove reviews that break their content guidelines, not reviews that are merely harsh.

The Federal Trade Commission updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in late 2009, and they apply to online reviews and social media. The key points for a business:

• A review written by an employee, owner or anyone with a financial connection to the business must disclose that connection. Posting as a customer is deceptive.
• If you give someone anything of value for a review, the review must disclose it, and you are responsible for making sure it does.
• Testimonials on your own website that claim results must be typical, or you must state what the typical result is. "Lost 40 pounds" with a footnote that says "results not typical" no longer satisfies the rule.

The FTC settled its first case under the updated guides in 2010 against a PR firm whose employees posted glowing app reviews without disclosure. Several state attorneys general have gone after fake-review schemes under consumer protection laws as well. The reputational cost of being outed is worse than the fine: Yelp posts about businesses caught gaming reviews, and local press loves the story.

Set up Google Alerts for your business name for mentions outside the review sites, and use the free Yelp owner dashboard, which shows how many people viewed your page and clicked through. Add a question to your intake form or phone script, "How did you hear about us?", so you can connect reviews to revenue.

Responding angrily in public, which turns one bad review into a story. Ignoring reviews entirely for six months. Having staff review the business from the office computer, which Yelp detects by IP address. Running a contest for reviews. Asking only your best friends and family, whose reviews get filtered and whose enthusiasm looks fake. And treating a bad review as a PR problem rather than information about the business.

We begin with discovery across every listing and review site where your business appears, including the ones you did not know existed. We plan a listing cleanup, a compliant ask process for staff, and response templates in your voice. We build the pieces: a reviews page on the site, consistent profiles, alerts and a tracking sheet. Then we improve monthly by reading what customers say and feeding it back into service and marketing. Reputation, social, web and search are treated as one connected system because customers experience them as one.

A representative engagement in our performance work: a multi-location service business with inconsistent listings and no response process. We cleaned up and claimed every profile, trained location managers on asking and responding within policy, and tied review activity to call tracking so the owner could see which locations' reputations were producing inquiries.