While the popular online review site has been helping people find excellent restaurants, supermarkets, museums and much more for quite some time, they want to improve it even further. It has always been easy and effective to use Yelp to look up customer reviews of different businesses, but it wouldn’t really give you the whole picture on what was going on in the area. Sure, the restaurant you are considering might be getting 5 stars for their excellent cuisine, but how safe is your vehicle in the parking lot, or can you take a romantic walk along the waterfront after dinner?
Yelp is hoping to add this type of additional information by using a heat mapping technology which will use the density of keywords in the reviews to help create additional context for the users. If, for example, a majority of people use the term, “romantic” in their review it is clearly going to be a great destination for a romantic evening with a loved one. There are many other topics which can come up in this type of aggregation, and Yelp is hoping that it will assist its users in making an even more informed decision.
Since those writing the reviews on Yelp can discuss virtually anything about the business it should be possible to create a large list of different terms people use to describe each business. Using this information Yelp can pass on more than just the quality of the food at a restaurant, and help people get a good feel for the type of environment they can expect as well.
Currently this new Yelp tool is only available in their top cities which have the largest number of reviews to gather information for. They will likely expand the service to other cities over the coming months or years depending on the success of the feature. The cities for which you can currently use this tool are:
Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto and Washington DC.
This new tool is important for local SEO experts as well as local marketers because it will allow them to benefit further from customer reviews. Improving one aspect of a business that isn’t directly impacting the customer can now still bring in benefits as people write about the fresh look and feel of a business. Marketers can attempt to have reviews written which mention the types of keywords they want to be associated with as well.
What are your thoughts on this new feature from Yelp? Will you be able to use it for your local marketing?
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