Yelp for Business Adds Keyword Boosting Options

Business directory and crowdsourced review forum Yelp rolled out several new features for its Yelp for Business experience Tuesday aimed at giving business owners more control over their ads on the platform and helping them to optimize their ad budgets by engaging with more high-intent users. The company explained in a blog post, “As local businesses look to set themselves up for success in 2022, it’s never been more important for them to connect with their communities. For many, this means having a simple advertising platform that helps them find and engage directly with their target audiences. To address this growing need, Yelp is focused on building new self-serve advertising tools and content capabilities that empower local businesses to take control of their advertising budgets and audience targeting, as well as measure the effectiveness and efficiency of their ads and content.” Yelp’s new Keyword Boosting option enables advertisers to direct portions of their budget toward specific keywords and, conversely, remove budget from keywords they find undesirable. Combining Keyword Boosting with Yelp’s Keyword Blocking option enables businesses to more narrowly target their campaigns to audiences looking for the specific products or services they are promoting. Yelp provided the following example in its blog post: “A breakfast restaurant could decide to focus advertising spend toward the keywords, ‘Sunday brunch,’ which might provide a higher return on investment than other keywords … This is especially helpful for services businesses, which are now able to boost ads to keywords that may return higher quality leads and drive more revenue for them—for example, bathroom remodels or masonry jobs.” Custom Location Targeting, which debuted last May for home and local services businesses, is being extended to all new and existing Yelp Ads customers, enabling businesses to customize the specific geographic location where their ads appear and reach a wider audience beyond their immediate physical location. Yelp debuted Yelp Connect in 2019 to give business owners more ways to communicate with existing and potential customers, starting with restaurants, and it extended Yelp Connect to all categories in March 2020 to help businesses share pandemic-spurred changes to available services, operating hours and other information. Tailored post templates were added to Yelp Connect Tuesday to help businesses produce compelling, engaging and effective content that is easily customizable to reflect seasonal moments and special offers. The mobile experiences for Yelp Connect was also updated to enable streamlined creation and publishing of content through an improved unified setup flow, which guides business owners step by step through uploading photos, setting service areas and creating their first posts via Connect. Finally, Yelp’s ads budgeting feature was updated to help business owners get more value for their ad dollars by leveraging more data points—such as category, listing age, rating and region—to make more informed budget recommendations. Yelp wrote in its blog post, “As we roll out these updated features, we’re already continuing to build and iterate on new tools to support business owners on Yelp. We’re deeply committed to helping local businesses—restaurants, home services, retailers and more3find success on Yelp using all of the products, features and tools we’ve created, from Yelp for Business to our self-serve ad channels.”