Moving your business to a new location can be filled with a lot of headaches. And as if moving your business itself isn’t stressful enough, once you’re in your new location you might have something else to worry about: your Yelp ratings — or rather, a lack of Yelp ratings.
According to Yelp’s official policy, when your business changes addresses, they create a new page and you start over. Yelp’s rationale is fair — location can be a big part of the consumer experience. A business that has been continually panned for its lack of parking, for example, may not have that issue in a new location with a big parking lot and would benefit from a fresh start. Simply put, physical location is a part of the customer experience.
But for some businesses that have worked hard to build and maintain the kind of reputation that garners positive reviews, wiping the slate clean can be a huge disappointment. For one thing, it’s a known statistic that the longer a business is in business, the more slowly they get new reviews – something we at RatingsMax call “review velocity.” A tenured business that moves, even right next door, will have a tougher time accumulating the number and quality of reviews to get back to the top of review site listings. Worse yet a domino effect happens, those reviews are a big component of the business’s performance in search engines.
In a perfect world, reviews are meant to show the averaged impressions of a typical customer. The errant bad review should be balanced out by a preponderance of good reviews, giving a relatively true overall review and rating. But without any reviews, one angry customer can tank the business’ entire reputation – that exact scenario happened to one of our clients that moved her business. Within days RatingsMax got six new reviews bringing the business from 1-star to 4-stars on Yelp.
At the core of RatingsMax is getting more new reviews – ones that truly reflect the customer experience at your business. We solve the problem of getting reviews from the customers who wouldn’t normally leave them. With RatingsMax that business you moved will have a whole bunch of fresh reviews in no time flat.
We know that bad reviews themselves can be affected by many factors besides the true business experience. They could be affected by the customer’s mood, the environment, sometimes even the weather! There’s no need to let your rating take a devastating hit just because of one customer.
We have a wide range of services to support businesses in the management of their online reputations. We can improve both the quantity and quality of your reviews. We also work within social platforms to make sure those new, positive reviews are seen beyond the platform they were created in. We have helped many companies raise their average star ratings, review volume and search rank through more new and better reviews.
