If you’re running a business in today’s digital age, having a noticeable number of glowing reviews on a major online review platform will give you an edge over your competitors. Online reviews play a crucial role in building or breaking a business’s online reputation. Businesses often struggle to choose a suitable review platform between Yelp and Google to acquire new customers and grow their business. Thus, the Yelp vs Google reviews are a real thing in today’s highly competitive landscape.
Did you know that Google accounts for nearly 73% of all online reviews in 2024, while Yelp has nearly 2.5 million visitors every day?
As a business owner, you must know how you can leverage both Google’s and Yelp’s enormous audience visibility. But firstly, you need to identify which platform can offer you the maximum benefits.
The blog will thoroughly explore the advantages and disadvantages of Google and Yelp as major review platforms, along with the major features they provide, budget insights, and comparison points. Let’s get started!
Understanding the Yelp Review Platform
Yelp refers to a major online review platform where customers can rate and review businesses based on their experience with them. Before we take a dig into whether Yelp is trustworthy or beneficial for business, let’s start with the basics.
Who founded Yelp? The platform was founded by two former PayPal employees, Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, in 2004. The site was developed with the mindset regarding the importance of peer recommendations in choosing a business.
You can create a basic business listing on Yelp for free, and your potential customers can browse your business name to check the reviews even without a subscription. The platform also has a mobile application that publishes countless crowd-sourced reviews for businesses.
What Are Yelp Reviews?
These are user-generated ratings and comments that customers (users of the Yelp review platform) post on the Yelp platform about their experiences with different businesses. They share their experiences of seeking and using products and services from a business listed on Yelp.
People leave star ratings (between 1 and 5 stars) for businesses on Yelp, and write a description of their personal experience with photos.
Through these reviews, consumers get to know about the major information of specific products and services, and make informed purchase decisions based on the gained insights. Similarly, businesses receive valuable customer feedback that they can use to improve their offerings.
How Does the Yelp Review Platform Work for Businesses?
A Yelp statistic shows that 9 out of 10 consumers (93% ) are more likely to read online reviews before making purchase decisions. You can now imagine how online reviews impact a business in numerous ways.
The Yelp review platform plays a huge role in growing or breaking a business. Here’s how the platform works for your business.
- Online Reputation and Visibility – You can claim your free listing on Yelp to receive customer feedback and improve your online visibility. While positive Yelp reviews can improve your business’s online reputation, negative reviews can damage it. Businesses can manage their business information on Yelp and respond to their customer reviews. If you create a business profile on Yelp, it significantly enhances your online visibility.
- Marketing Tool – Yelp serves as a great marketing tool for businesses. How? Let’s find out. Businesses can generate new leads and attract foot traffic by promoting Yelp reviews. Having a good number of business reviews on Yelp showcases a business as a reliable and credible resource, establishing customer trust for free.
- Review Listing and Filtering – Do you know that potential customers can search for businesses and compare them to choose the most suitable one? Yes, when a user searches for a business on Yelp, the platform shows a list of businesses matching their search criteria. Customers can filter the search results based on distance, price range, and categories. Using these filters, users can quickly find the business that they need.
- Search Functionality – Your potential customers who are actively looking for a specific service or product can search for businesses that offer the same. They can search relevant keywords and their location on Yelp’s search bar to find nearby businesses. Users can search for businesses in their location and compare multiple reviews that Yelp recommends.
- Business Details – When a user creates a listing on Yelp, the platform provides more information about the business, including the address, contact details, operating hours, and user-generated photos with reviews.
- Interaction and Additional Features – Users can even bookmark businesses and follow them on Yelp for updates and notifications about any special offers they’re providing. Consumers can even directly message businesses through Yelp. If a business allows the option of booking online appointments through Yelp, users can place online orders, book appointments, or even access other services directly through Yelp.
What Are the Benefits of the Yelp Review Platform Your Business Can Leverage?
Yelp, as a review platform, offers a list of benefits for a business. From providing a wide audience exposure to a business to offering business recommendation tools, the advantages are quite crucial.
Identifying the benefits of the Yelp platform, you can seamlessly decide whether you should prioritize this review platform for your business or not. Here in the blog, we have brought down Yelp vs Google reviews to help you choose a platform between these two. Let’s know about Yelp’s benefits first.
- Wide Online Exposure
According to a Yelp study, more than 76 million people visit Yelp each month to search for businesses. Now, imagine the level of online exposure the platform can provide to businesses!
These users often visit Yelp to leave authentic reviews or search for businesses. But does it make any difference to business? Well, yes! When you create a Yelp profile, it significantly boosts your brand visibility and recognition on a major online review platform like Yelp. Featuring your business on Yelp opens doors to a wider audience and gives your business amazing exposure for growth.
- User-friendly Features
The effectiveness of a tool highly depends on its features!
One of the major reasons why businesses love Yelp is its user-friendly features. Customers don’t need to log in to Yelp with a username to check the reviews. This specific thing has made the review checking process simpler and more convenient. Most people don’t want to go through the lengthy process of signing up. The ease of using Yelp features encourages visitors to use the platform more frequently.
- Recommendation Tools
Want to recommend your business to your potential customers? Yelp has an amazing recommendation feature that evaluates customer reviews based on their nature, quality, reliability, and actions on Yelp.
Yelp, as a popular review platform, ensures that the most trustworthy feedback rises to the top. It’s an automatic evaluation software that finds the most reliable and useful reviews to recommend the business to regular users. These specific factors enhance the online reputation of a business that offers excellent customer service.
What Are the Disadvantages of Yelp that You Can’t Ignore?
Apart from the benefits, this tool has some disadvantages as well. Let’s have a look at the drawbacks of Yelp.
- Hides Genuine Reviews
It may sound weird to you, but yes, the Yelp review platform hides trustworthy reviews. Despite having a feature that shows verified reviews more prominently, the platform moves certain reliable reviews to the ‘Not recommended’ section of your business profile. And this is quite a significant disadvantage of this platform! It can make some genuine customer feedback hidden from the user.
- Offers Expensive Enhanced Listing
Yelp offers costly enhanced listings. $350 is quite expensive, especially for small businesses, as most of them are more likely to have a limited budget. However, the enhanced listing profile on Yelp offers some incredible features, including CTA buttons, slideshows, and more. But if we specifically think about the pricing, it can be prohibitively expensive for many businesses.
- Receives Negative Reviews for Unlisted Businesses
Another surprising fact about Yelp is that someone can review your business on Yelp even if it’s not listed on the platform. Anyone can list your business on Yelp and start attracting reviews, even if you don’t claim it. This way, your business can receive negative reviews as well, and this thing is beyond your control!
Those negative reviews can damage your online reputation and erode customer trust. However, you can handle the situation well by implementing effective Yelp review management strategies like responding to those negative reviews, offering exceptional customer service, and optimizing your business profile.
Understanding the Google Review Platform
Google reviews are a huge part of Google Maps, and they allow customers to leave genuine reviews to guide other consumers to choose a reliable business. What sets Google apart is that it’s not only a review platform, but it also provides valuable business information about a business, such as business hours, navigational and factual insights, contact details, and more.
Apart from this, according to a Statista report, Google also represented 79.1% of the global online search engine market on desktop devices.
Is it free? Yes, creating a Google Business Profile is free, and users just need to have a verified account on Google to leave reviews on the platform. Users can even download the app on their mobile devices.
What Are Google Reviews?
These are customer feedback submitted on Google that includes real experiences of using products and services from specific businesses. It’s a prominent feature of Google that allows businesses to gather real-time customer reviews they can use to improve their offerings.
While a positive review on Google boosts a brand’s online reputation, negative Google reviews can significantly erode customer trust in the same business. Google reviews are user-generated feedback and ratings (1-star to 5-stars) posted on the Google platform.
Furthermore, they’re a major part of Google’s broader offering for local businesses, such as Google Business Profile and Google Maps.
How Does the Google Review Platform Work for Your Business?
In this blog about Yelp vs Google reviews, now we’ll talk about how Google works for your business as a review platform. The way Yelp works for your business is totally different from how Google works.
Effective Google review management strategies can help you handle different types of reviews your business receives through Google.
Let’s have a look at how the Google review platform works for your business.
- Search Functionality – Google’s search button functions differently from Yelp’s. Creating a Google Business listing for your business on the same platform can help you connect your profile to Google Maps. You can control how your business and your offerings appear on Google. So when someone searches for your business on Google, they’ll get to see the reviews as well.
- Receiving Customer Reviews – Once you’ve set your business profile on Google, you can easily receive customer reviews on it. Your customers can rate your business on a scale of 1 to 5 stars and share their detailed feedback about the products or services they’ve received from your business.
- Responding to Reviews – As a business owner, you can easily respond to your Google reviews through your Google Business Profile dashboard. Responding to every review on Google will help you address positive feedback, resolve matters raised in negative comments, and engage more with your customers.
- Facility to Organize Questions and Answer Session – Do you know that there is a Question and Answer section in your Google profile? Yes, it does. This specific section supplements the review section and allows customers to directly ask their queries about your offerings. Overall, this section helps to keep your business active and informative on Google.
What are the Advantages of Google as a Review Platform?
Just like the Yelp platform, Google also offers a list of benefits for businesses as a review site.
While choosing the best review platform for your business, you must explore the benefits you can achieve through prioritising Google reviews. Let’s have a look at the advantages.
- Boosts the Local SEO
Do you know that Google commands the majority (nearly 57-58%) of online reviews? And these reviews highly influence local buying decisions.
Google is a major search engine and review platform as well. When you properly optimize your Google Business Profile, it will elevate your local SEO rankings and boost your foot traffic. Local consumers are more likely to search for nearby businesses on Google and your positive
Google reviews can play the role of a marketing tool to attract those consumers. Google reviews will ensure your business’s higher visibility among potential customers who’re seeking relevant products and services in your service location.
- Affordable Option for Small Businesses
Small businesses often have a limited budget! So they need to make a mindful investment even for receiving online reviews from their customers.
Google as a review platform can be the best option for these small businesses as it is a free to use tool. You just need to create and optimize your Google Business Profile. And you’re good-to-go! You can receive your customer reviews without spending any money. However, Google offers basic features to manage reviews. To use premium features, you may need to invest a significant amount of money in other online review platforms.
- Offers a Higher volume of Customer Reviews
Google is used by millions of people globally. Similarly, the platform offers an easy review submission process. This increases the likelihood for businesses of receiving more feedback on Google than on other review platforms.
Google has a wide audience reach that will help you attract a higher volume of reviews. The more reviews your business has on Google, the more likely your potential customers will trust your business and feel interested in your offerings. Seeking professional online review management services can significantly boost your Google review generation efforts.
What Are the Disadvantages of the Google Review Platform?
The following are two major disadvantages of the Google review platform.
- Allows Users to Submit Ratings without Any Comments
Yes, it’s a huge problem. People can submit poor star ratings on Google without sharing any text comments. For example, a user can just leave a 1-star rating on Google without sharing the reason for giving such a poor rating to your business. A potential customer can perceive your business negatively based on such Google ratings.
This feature of Google lacks the depth and detail that most written reviews have. It also limits the review authenticity to understand the reliability of the business and the users as well.
- Offers Less Opportunities to Remove Fake Reviews
Although Google continuously updates its algorithm, there are still people who find loopholes in everything. This leads to them submitting fake and misleading reviews on Google. As the reviewers don’t need to submit reviews with ratings, your business becomes more likely to receive spam or fake reviews on Google.
Unfortunately, Google offers limited options to remove reviews. However, you can report those reviews and wait for their removal.
Yelp Vs. Google Reviews: A Quick Glance at the Key Differences among Major Review Platforms
Now that you’ve a basic idea of Yelp and the Google review platform, we will provide you with a brief overview of the major differences between these two popular review sites.
Let’s have a look at the real showdown: Yelp vs Google reviews and also the platforms.
| Sl No. | Factors | Google Review Platform | Yelp Review Platform |
| 1. | User Base | Google has 8.5 billion daily searches by the worldwide audience. | Yelp reported 76 million desktop and mobile app visitors. |
| 2. | User Intent | Most people use Google to conduct simple research or learn more about something. | High-intent users who’re more likely to purchase a product or service often visit Yelp to check reviews. |
| 3. | Authenticity of Factors | Google has a less strict automated detection system to identify fraudulent reviews and a team of human analysts to ensure review integrity. | Yelp takes more comprehensive measures to control the quality of reviews. |
| 4. | Audience Reach and Influence | The platform has a global reach and integrates many business listings and search results. | The platform mostly relies on the US market and has a significant influence on industries like restaurants, medical practices, and other local businesses. |
| 5. | Community Engagement | Google has a serviceable approach with less focus on community interaction. | The platform is known for its engaged community, as the users often post pictures and feedback for local businesses. |
| 6. | Visibility in Search | It shows directly in Google search and Maps. | You can check the Yelp reviews on the site or mobile app. |
| 7. | Fake Review Filtering | Google has a moderate AI-based review filtering system for fake reviews. | Yelp has rigorous filters to detect fake reviews. |
| 8. | Review Detail Quality | Google reviews are mostly short. | Yelp reviews are more detailed and longer. |
| 9. | Local SEO Impact | Google reviews significantly impact the local SEO ranking of a business. | Yelp reviews have an indirect impact on your business’s local SEO. |
| 10. | Ease of Use | You can access Google reviews with just one click from Google search results. | You don’t need to log in to Yelp to check reviews, or you can do it as a guest user. |
| 11. | Media Support | Google supports every media type, such as photos and videos, as a review platform. | Yelp also supports every media type in a more detailed way. |
| 12. | Cost to Use | It’s completely free. | This platform is also free, but it also offers expensive enhanced listings and paid ads features. |
| 13. | Ideal for | Businesses that offer services and require a broad audience reach to grow their customer base can focus on Google as their primary review platform. | Local businesses, small brands that offer products and services, can prioritize the Yelp review platform. |
How to Select the Best Review Platform for Your Business?
Now, you have a general overview of Yelp vs Google reviews, right?
Based on the differences mentioned above, you can choose a review platform for your business to receive. Narrowing your platform choices can help you prioritize and develop your online customer review strategy more effectively.
Factors You Must Consider:
Apart from these differences, you need to keep certain factors in mind while choosing the most suitable online review platform for your business. Let’s have a look at those factors.
- Who Are You Targeting?
It may sound weird! But Yelp and Google target different types of audiences.
You need to decide who your business is attracting – the age group, gender, and professions. You need to choose your target demographic before choosing your review platform.
For example, you have chosen Yelp as your review platform but most of your target audience is not active on it. This will decrease the likelihood of getting customer reviews. That’s why choosing a suitable review platform is crucial.
A 2020 study by the Pollack Group revealed that 75% of Gen Z people have never written a Yelp review. This specific generation highly relies on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and then turns to Google when it comes to online research.
Note: If your business is targeting the Gen Z demographic, you will make a wise decision by choosing Google as your review platform.
And on the flip side, the same thing happens for Yelp reviews.
Do you know that 39% of Yelp users are mostly aged 55 and above? If your business is targeting this age group, you can focus on managing Yelp reviews for your business.
- Do You Need to Prioritize SEO?
When it comes to SEO, you must focus on Google reviews. In terms of SEO, Google reviews undoubtedly offer more value than Yelp reviews.
Google Maps will help you develop location-based marketing strategies and drive more foot traffic to your physical store. It can help you attract the local customer base and maintain a strong local business presence. So if you prioritize SEO, you must choose Google reviews.
However, Google doesn’t hold the same power to rank your business for local search queries online.
- What is Your Primary Focus in terms of Customer Reviews?
Ratings are treated differently on both the Google and Yelp platforms.
For example, you cannot send review requests to your customers to leave their feedback on Yelp. But you can send invites to your customers to leave reviews on Google. This could be a real problem if you only receive reviews after asking your customers.
Removing bad reviews on Google is a daunting task! While deleting Yelp reviews may not be. You need to identify which approach is more helpful for your business’s online reputation.
- What is Your Budget?
Budget plays a huge role here!
Identify which review platform is paid or free among Google and Yelp. Yelp has both a free and paid premium option that offers upgraded features. You can get some exceptional features with the premium version of Yelp, including –
- A call to action button
- Business highlights
- Verification
- A logo
- Removed competitor ads
- Photo slideshow
- A portfolio
A true fact! While upgrades can make your Yelp page look more professional and attractive to your potential customers, you have to pay a lump sum for the same. And, of course, Google Business Profile is completely free!
So, choose accordingly based on your budget for spending on a review platform.
FAQs
Ans. Yelp is specifically designed for potential customers to read and write reviews, while Google reviews is an additional feature of the Google platform designed for the same purpose. Both review platforms have their unique relevance. The one that will benefit your business the most completely depends on the industry your business is in and what your requirements are.
Q. 2 Should I prioritize Yelp More than Google?
Ans. It depends on your requirements related to review platforms. While Yelp strictly filters fake or low-effort reviews, Google focuses more on automation. However, Google allows fake reviews to stay longer in its search results. Yelp reviews are more detailed, but the filtering system can hide genuine feedback. If you prioritize detecting fake reviews, you can choose Yelp.
Ans. You must quickly and politely respond to the negative reviews received through Google. On Yelp, you can reply to the reviews either publicly or privately, depending on the consequences you may have. However, Google only allows public responses. You need to stay calm and express your sincere apology to the reviewer for the inconvenience caused. Additionally, we suggest that you thank the reviewer first for taking their valuable time to share their concern. Don’t forget to mention how you have planned to fix the issue.
Ans. Yes, certainly. Yelp users post longer and more detailed reviews, mentioning every aspect of their purchase. Google users are more diverse and often leave star ratings and short comments.
Ans. Google reviews appear on Google search and maps, which makes them more widely visible to the global audience. On the other hand, Yelp reviews are more trusted by local businesses like restaurants, salons, medical practices, and the like. However, most of the businesses get better results by using both review platforms for online marketing purposes.
Ans. Yes, they may appear. Business details and user-generated content from Yelp can appear in Google search results. But these details may differ from what is currently displayed on the Yelp website. This specifically happens because of Yelp’s dynamic nature!
Conclusion
Confused enough about choosing a suitable review platform for your business?
We hope that your confusion is now cleared after exploring the entire blog. We hope that the ultimate differentiation between Yelp vs Google reviews and the review platforms will help you choose the perfect review platform for your business.
Still requires professional guidance? You can hire a reputable online reputation management agency to seek expert and personalized recommendations regarding the most suitable review platform for your business.
