Yet Another Yahoo Search Upgrade, This Time With Yelp

Yahoo is making great strides to improve their local search results. Since Marissa Mayer has taken over as CEO, the company has been making strategic deals and technological improvements that make Yahoo a more user friendly platform while attracting businesses to their advertising solutions. Prior to now, they haven’t had a robust local business directories solution. Recently, Yahoo announced a partnership with Yelp that will change that.

Yelp results will now show up in local search results for a business. For example, if a user types in Santa Monica Italian restaurant, the results will be populated from Yahoo’s local business directories along with Yelp marketing results. That means that reviews will auto populate along with images. This is fantastic news for local businesses and also demonstrates the importance of maintaining and promoting your Yelp profile.

Businesses may be familiar with how Yelp reviews populate on Bing. They may appear under the organic search results and a structured box on the right that includes images and graphic rich content. Insiders speculate that Yahoo will go further than Bing to make local search results look more like Google’s. Yelp marketing should be included in every small business’s overall SEO strategy as reviews have been proven to help consumers make buying decisions. If your competition has reviews and you don’t, consumers are likely to go to the competition.

How Local Business Directories Help Your Business

When you list your business on Yahoo’s Local Business Directory, or with Google or Bing, it enables you to come up in organic search results without paying for advertising space. Your business will show up in a local search for businesses in your particular category. Now that Yahoo has partnered with Yelp, reviews will populate underneath your business name along with your contact information. This makes it easy for consumers to make a buying decision and to contact you.

How to Get Started

List your business with Yahoo’s Local Business Directory or ask the team at Local SEO Sites to do this for you. Create a Yelp profile and start a Yelp Marketing strategy to acquire more customer reviews. The more reviews you have, the better. Local SEO Sites can also help you with a review generation strategy. Once your profiles have been completed, and reviews generated, you can start showing up in local search results for businesses in your category. This will give you additional opportunities to acquire more customers and grow your business.