8 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Yelp’s Check-In Offers

Yelp introduced check-in offers back in 2010 yet a lot of businesses still aren’t taking advantage of them. This feature allows business owners to reward customers with a coupon or incentive for checking in at their location using the Yelp app. You could offer a free cup of coffee, or a discount on their purchase etc. This feature can only be used by businesses who have a physical location that customers visit so Service-Area businesses like plumbers or limos cannot take advantage of this.

Why should your small business care about these?

1. Check-ins are a ranking factor on Yelp. Want your business listing to show up higher on Yelp’s search results and get more visibility on Google? Check-ins can help you do this.

2. Check-ins will help you gain reviews on Yelp. Most business owners know how strict Yelp’s review filter is. It makes it extremely difficult for businesses to gain reviews. Yelp also tells business owners not to solicit reviews. However, at SMX West, the Yelp speaker said that offering someone something free so that they check-in to your business on Yelp is okay. Then the next time someone logs onto their Yelp account, Yelp will prompt them to leave a review for the businesses they checked in to. Reviews accompanied by check-ins are also way less likely to get filtered!

3. Every 5 seconds a call is made to a local business from the Yelp app. People are using the Yelp app to find local businesses. Make sure yours stands out and gets noticed.

4. When someone checks in to your location, Yelp broadcasts this to their friends and connections.

5. People who use Yelp choose what businesses to visit based on their check-in offers. Everyone likes a good deal.

6. Yelp has been dominating the search results for local queries since the 2014 Pigeon update. Other than your website and G+ page, Yelp might be the second most powerful online profile you can get ranked on Google.

7. Small business owners earn about $8,000 a year from their free Yelp accounts. It’s clear people are using Yelp. So why not take advantage of all the free promotional tools?

8. Users can save your check in offers for next time they are there. So this can help give an incentive for repeat business!

It takes less than 5 minutes to create a check-in offer. I’d say it’s a good use of time.

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Joy Hawkins

Joy is the owner of the Local Search Forum, LocalU, and Sterling Sky, a Local SEO agency in Canada & the USA. She has been working in the industry since 2006, writes for publications such as Search Engine Land, and enjoys speaking regularly at marketing conferences such as MozCon, LocalU, Pubcon, SearchLove, and State of Search. You can find her on Twitter or volunteering as a Product Expert on the Google My Business Forum.

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