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What I know about Yelp is that I would say 90% of the people that I talked to and Yelp comes into the conversation, they absolutely hate Yelp for different reasons. Either Yelp is like filtering their good reviews and won't show their good reviews, they're only showing their bad reviews. That's a very common one. I'm not sure how Yelp is legally getting away with that, but they do. Another one is you're not allowed to ask for reviews from Yelp anymore. So like we have an easy five star review system and the company that we partner with to run that, the engine that runs it, absolutely will not request Yelp reviews for you on your behalf because it violates Yelp's guidelines. So Yelp has all these crazy guidelines and they hide good reviews sometimes, or filter them out.
Another thing is they've got some pretty ruthless sales people. So I think they got a team of salespeople, they probably make really good money. And they will lie, they will harass you. From what clients tell me, this is not my opinion, this is what clients are telling me to say, that salespeople will call up and say that there's 10,000 people looking for water damage services, or plumbing services, or roofing services, whatever it may be on Yelp every month. And they'll just say whatever they can, whatever they need to say to get your credit card and close the deal. That's the opinion of a lot of people. And I've been called by Yelp salespeople before, and they are... There's a lot of pressure. They don't mess around. They're there to make sales.
So a lot of negativity around Yelp, but on the flip side, if you're on the West Coast, specifically, the big cities in California, then Yelp is almost a must. Like, you almost have to have Yelp. My friend Deon Bush over in Los Angeles, he's got a four or five truck carpet cleaning water damage restoration company, and he says he gets calls from Yelp every single day. Now, how does he do that? He doesn't pay for Yelp ads, he's not paying for Yelp ads. How is he getting called from Yelp every single day? Well, over the last 10 years he's put a lot of time and effort into getting Yelp reviews. I think he's got the second highest number of Yelp reviews in his area. And most of them are very positive reviews because he does good quality work. So he is very dependent on Yelp and he gets jobs. He also hustles and gets jobs in other ways, but Yelp is still one of the main lead sources that he gets for his business.
And I've heard other people in areas of California say that around the rest of the country for service businesses... For restaurants Yelp is a big deal everywhere, but for service-based industries it's not that big in the rest of the country. The bigger cities it's somewhat big, it's kind of secondary to Google, but in California, the big cities in California, you got to have it, it's number one, it beats Google out every time.
