Yelp is Generating Leads for Your Competition with Your Website – Here’s How
The team at Built-Right Digital ran across a strange new feature on Yelp this morning. When you click on your website link on your Yelp listing, instead of taking you to your website, you see your website… but with a newly added Yelp bar at the top!
The new elements add your Yelp review count and star rating, and a new Request a Quote button.
Why is Yelp changing your website?
Why is Yelp changing how your website appears? Well, the reason becomes pretty clear when you click the “Request a Free Quote” button that Yelp adds to the top of your website.
You would assume that clicking “Request a Free Quote” on your own website and next to your own online reviews would lead a customer to get a quote from you. In reality, your customer gets a quote from your competition as well. Here’s how!
An In-Depth Look at the Quote Form Yelp Puts Over Your Website
Being the curious people that we are, we clicked the “Request a Free Quote” button on our client’s website. Here is what we saw, in 4 easy steps.
1) Appears to be a quote direct from you
2) Add a few details. Feels oddly like a HomeAdvisor form!
3) Get Quotes from Competitors.
Your customer might THINK they were requesting a quote directly from you. They WERE on your website, and looking at solely YOUR online reviews, after all. Then this pops up!
The checkbox for “Get multiple quotes” is checked by default, but you can uncheck it. A customer who is reading closely can make sure that only YOU get their information, which is nice. So that’s what we did, we unchecked the box and moved forward.
4) Doesn’t Work if You DON’T Want Competitor Quotes
Oh NO! Yelp doesn’t send the lead if you don’t want multiple quotes from competitors. This is likely due to our client not being signed up for Yelp’s lead delivery service. A customer won’t realize that, though. They will just think your website is broken and not accepting quotes, since they started the quote request process on what looked JUST like your website. That customer will almost certainly pick a new remodeler to call.
So there you have it! Your customers may be seeing an altogether different version of your website from Yelp. We noticed this feature just recently, so it may still be in Beta testing. Be ready to jump on any leads you get from Yelp, as they may be sent to both you and several of your competitors!
If you are depending on customers reaching out to you based on your great online reviews, you will want to read our Top Review Sites for Home Remodelers Guide. It’s packed with helpful information. You can also fill in the form below to get our Review Request Templates, to get 5-star reviews across the web.
