Last summer, Yelp quietly started providing embed code that you can use to stick any customer’s Yelp review on your site.
As closely as I monitor Yelp, I didn’t know about that feature until now. A few people wrote about it in passing, but I didn’t know about it until Mike of HikingMike told me in his comment on my 2015 post on copying and pasting Yelp reviews. (By the way, I really appreciate getting intel like that.)
The embed code might be easier and cleaner-looking than a copy-and-paste or a screenshot. Here’s what an embedded review would look like:
Read Chris B.‘s review of Local Visibility System on Yelp
How do you get the embed code? Just go to your Yelp page (or your client’s), hover over the review, and click “Embed review.”
Why embed your Yelp reviews on your site? Just because it’s usually showing off your reviews in general – both on Yelp and on any other review sites. You can’t assume everyone saw them before getting to your site. Your site should showcase what customers say about you, rather than just what you say about yourself.
Maybe hold off if only unhappy customers or unfair idiots have reviewed you.
Consider giving the embed feature a try while (1) it’s still around, (2) it’s straightforward, and (3) little-known. As Mike wrote wisely in his comment:
“This info will be coming from Yelp so it would rely on their side continuing the embed service. If there were some issue, a location move, or something out of the ordinary, I could see the reviews not showing suddenly. They could change their embed method or code as well.
“But I’m also curious about what happens if the Yelp filter removes a review you have embedded. Will the embed still work or will it disappear? I know a lot of times reviews will show initially and then be filtered within a day or so (usually people that have just 1 review), so I wonder how it will work with those.”
Did you know about Yelp’s embed code before I did?
Have you used it?
Will you use it?
Leave a comment!
I’ve used it for a lot of clients on specific landing pages. If Yelp filters the review, the review still appears, but the review stars switch from red to the dark gray. The link back to the actual user no longer works, either – the review only links back to the business.
Excellent. Thanks, Phillip!
Thanks for letting us know that Phillip. It is good they have a process in place for embeds if the review is filtered.
Nice info. Didn’t know about it. Our smb types don’t naturally attract reviewers. We use “review management”. We ask for them. Unfortunately most of the yelp reviews we’ve received for our most reviewed smb’s end up in the filtered “not recommended” section. Cr@p we have two smb’s with a high number of total reviews including yelp and they respectively have 60 and 80%+ of the reviews being filtered.
BTW: I was going to link so much to a “filtered page” that I was hoping to get it to show in serps for a particular name brand search. Then I looked at those filtered pages. They all have no index.robots commands. Dang it. No opportunity to get them to show. Oh well…
But you do get a notification from yelp when it first shows. I’d use the embed code ASAP.
Anyway nice advise and nice opportunity to get yelp reviews to be seen on your site before they go into the yelp netherworld.
Dave, I know what you mean with the filtered. Yelp has been known to be the strictest filter, and people without much activity or just one review are guaranteed to get theirs filtered out. It seems like Yelp’s system doesn’t really work very well for industries that don’t get a lot of reviews, such as smaller, non-restaurant service companies.
You’re right about grabbing them before they get filtered. But I tried it out and I was able to get the IDs needed for the Yelp embed code from the page with the filtered reviews and those embed OK as well (slightly different with gray stars and an extra link to Yelp at the bottom). I’m going to work on that more soon for ours.
Thanks to Phil for the shoutout 🙂
Good intel, Mike. Thanks!
@Dave
Sounds like you’ll want to get your Yelp “Find Friends” on:
https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2016/03/15/how-to-bulk-identify-prime-yelp-reviewers-with-yelps-find-friends-feature-in-7-easy-steps/
Or at least point more people to a “Review Us” page, where one of the choices is Yelp.
I’ve done that. It ended up being unproductive. We did try it. It of course makes sense, but in our case we weren’t finding enough matches.
This is really good information, Phil. Thank you. And thanks to the commenters who added great info. I am going to try this immediately.
Sounds like a good plan, Jennifer.
Question for you, Phil: where would you recommend embedding these on the site? Reviews/testimonials page? Own page? Elsewhere?
Totally depends on the site, on how many good Yelp reviews there are, and on what the reviews say. I’d put them on a reviews/testimonials page at the very least. I’d probably also put relevant reviews on pages for specific services and on other “money” pages.
Thanks for the update Phil – we may have a few clients where this would be helpful 🙂
How does this work with the revised review schema guidelines from Google? I thought that with the review update last year (https://searchengineland.com/google-updates-local-reviews-schema-guidelines-257745), reviews that were produced in 3rd party sites such as Yelp etc would be treated as duplicate content if posted in your own site.
The embed code is just some Javascript. The reviews aren’t actually on your page.
Hello,
I tried to embed the code into my website, but I am unable to change the width of it. Right now, there is a tiny scrollbar on my yelp widget. I did inspect element on my widget and change the width on there. It seemed to decrease the width of the Yelp review widget but once I refresh it goes back to the scrollbar. Can you please tell me how I can make the change
As far as I know, there’s very little customizing you can do. It’s Yelp’s Javascript.
Hi Rohit,
I had the same issue. I found I could set min-width: 350px; for a container div and that prevented scrollbars on the yelp embedded review. When I inspect it, I see the iframe has max-width: 700px; min-width: 320px;. It seemed to obey the 700px max-width but not the 320px min-width, perhaps due to some conflicting CSS which I could not find.