Question: I have problem with Yelp because I didn’t want to advertise with them now they block my local free ad. What should I do?
Answer:
Yelp is notorious for bad customer service. I love Yelp as a consumer and I think it provides some very useful review based listings of local businesses, but my clients and I have had several run-ins with the Yelp customer service team and they have been not very friendly, to be blunt.
Yelp and Small Business Listings
Here is the official policy of how Yelp is supposed to work. Every business is supposed to be able to claim their local Yelp listing at http://biz.yelp.com. This listing may or may not exist, but if it exists, you can claim it as the business, and if it does not exist you can create it. That is free. Once you claim your listing, you can add photographs, a better description, and you can talk back with customers. You do not, however, have complete control over the listing: customers can write bad reviews.
Advertising on Yelp and Small Businesses
Advertising on Yelp is something entirely different, and you can choose to advertise, and you can choose not to advertise. So according to your question you seem to be implying that by not advertising they have turned your listing off. I doubt this is true, and if you like we can look at this issue together. I suspect that either your free listings does not exist, in which case you need to create it, or it has not been correctly claimed.
Yelp has been subject to several lawsuits, by small businesses, and nowadays I actually think they are doing better in terms of separating the free offerings on Yelp and the paid offerings on Yelp. They are a small startup company and I really do like them, and I am quite a big fan of Yelp especially versus Google. But they definitely have their growing pains.
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