Yahoo Partners with Yelp
Earlier this week, former search luminary, Yahoo, announced its new alliance with Yelp.
Yahoo appears to be making a move to regain a portion of the search market it once had before slipping a midst the arrival of bing and throwing in the towel on the map frontier. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer appears to be focused especially upon mobile search.
By aligning with Yelp, Yahoo will be able to display reviews and photos provide by Yelp along side search results.
[blockquote]Now when you use Yahoo Search to look up a local business in the U.S. on your smartphone, tablet, or PC, you’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp. We’ve also added a new photo viewing experience to show high-quality photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.[/blockquote]
As can be seen in the example below, a geo-specific search query produces an announcement from Yahoo, alerting its users to the fact that reviews and photos are provided by Yelp. Additional evidence can be seen in the Local Search results, with ratings from Yahoo and ratings from Yelp clearly denoted. Yahoo also displays local business information alongside search results.
Local SEOs take note: Ensure your clients maintain a clean NAP profile across all web properties. And, be sure to encourage a proactive approach to Reputation Management, especially with Google+ reviews and Yelp reviews – not necessarily in that order.
