How to Use Yelp's "Trending Search Terms" to Optimize Your Profile & Ads

From the above terms we see that a majority are likely practice-specific and two others are too general. For the sake of this guide we'll assume that two of these trending terms apply to a fictional dental practice and now discuss ways to implement "Chinese Dentist" and "Dentist Open on Saturday" into its profile and Yelp Ads to take advantage of these trends in Yelp searches.

Lost near the bottom of Yelp's email is a very clear recommendation to include these trending search terms in photo captions and tags, so we'll take their recommendation and start here with improving our profile. For all the below optimizations, start by logging into your Business Yelp Account (https://biz.yelp.com/) on your desktop or through the Yelp for Business App.

Photos

In the below example, we've chosen to upload a photo for the fictional Doctor Elizabeth Chen, from China. We've mentioned specifically in the photo caption that Dr. Chen is "originally from China" and "speaks Mandarin." A more optimized caption might be "Chinese Dentist Elizabeth Chen DDS" but we find this to be a less elegant solution, even if more closely matching the trending search term we are targeting. Use your own discretion in how you add or edit captions for photos.

The "About the Owner" and Business Description Section

From here you will be able to upload a square owner photo, input their first name, role at the business and some personal bio details. This is a great section to insert both keywords from Yelp's new trending searches data or keywords that you know are important to the business in general. Here we chose to indicate that Dr. Chen is originally from China and we may want to consider listing that she speaks Mandarin.

Important to note, there are specific language options in the Business Highlights (a paid feature) and additional non-paid sections such as the business History or Specialities, found in the same section are also great opportunities to try to incorporate trending keywords. It really doesn't matter as all three fields allow for paraphrases of text and can usually fit in natural language surrounding target keywords.

In the case of Saturday hours, the solution is even more obvious. Simply select business information from the left-hand sidebar and edit the office hours to include Saturdays. This signal, alone should be enough to trigger your profile for Saturday-related searches. If your practice is only open on select Saturdays, mark your business as open on Saturday and then use the "Upcoming Special Hours" section to notate all the upcoming Saturdays in which your office will be closed.

User Reviews

This is obviously going to be the most difficult way to optimize your profile around trending search terms, but due to the way Yelp's (or even Google's) algorithm is setup, business owners should always be thinking of ways to incorporate not only trending search terms, but also core target keywords into your user reviews. However, since it is against Yelp's guidelines to ask for reviews, and even worse, to ask for reviews with specific wording, you're best opportunity is to give your customers written prompts or subtle hints for what to write about. By reminding them to write about which doctor they saw or which procedures were performed during their visit, target keywords will follow rather than basic descriptors like "great, amazing etc." We will cover this in detail in an upcoming article. For now, it's important to know that keywords within reviews will have an impact on how your business shows up in Yelp's organic search results.

Until now we have covered free features within Yelp's business owner accounts but for practices looking to either enhance their profile, or get featured in the "Sponsored" section of the search results list, paid Yelp Ads also afford an opportunity to make your profile keyword rich and highly targeted. Some of the enhanced features, such as Business Portfolios and Call to Action links work great for this purpose.

Business Portfolios

We recently wrote in detail about Yelp Portfolios and how to optimize them for additional search real estate and to showcase your projects and services. Although this paid enhancement is intended for home service businesses to showcase their projects and portfolios, at the end of the day Portfolios are just a collection of photos and text with the option for a call-to-action button and optional budget and timeframe information. For this reason, they can be used for nearly any purpose, including creating a portfolio around trending search terms.

If we're promoting our Mandarin-speaking dentist, Dr. Chen we might fill out the ensuing fields like this:

• Name of Project: Meet our Multi-lingual Staff
• Add Photos: Post a photo of Dr. Chen with the caption "Elizabeth Chen DDS graduated in 2012 from USC and speaks fluent Mandarin."
• Add a Description: "We invite you to meet some of the best dental professionals in the area. Our staff is pleased to serve guests and all members of the community. In office we have several dentists who speak Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic."

Call-to-Action Links (CTA)

Although this paid enhancement is usually used for promotions, to highlight free consultations or, more recently to discuss COVID-19 services, it can really be used for any purpose. A Call to Action (CTA) is simply a combination of a few words of text, a link and a button leading to desired "action." We recommend experimenting with different CTA's to promote your practice and measuring the results periodically to see which ones are most effective.

For this exercise, we're going to create a Call to Action that advertises Saturday hours.

Positive and Negative Keywords

If you're running Yelp Ads (cost-per-click ads) to show up in the Sponsored Results of the search results list then, boosting trending keywords is a fairly straight-forward process and one worth exploring. This optimization to your ads account will instruct Yelp to boost your ad distribution within trending search phrases such as "Chinese Dentist" or "Dentist Open on Saturday".

Conclusion

While optimization of your Yelp profile for trending search terms might take some work and creativity, the payoff could be well worth your time. A dental professional who speaks Mandarin, for example could – with a few small tweaks – open up their Yelp profile to Yelp users of Chinese heritage looking for a doctor that speaks their language and can more accurately address their concerns in their native language. And as we know, new patients are often acquired through word-of-mouth or family referrals so the lifetime value of one new patient and their referrals acquired through these techniques could quickly more than pay for the 30-60 minutes it takes to implement some of these optimizations!

Need additional help? Consider partnering with an Authorized Yelp Partner to optimize your profile and campaign!