How come yelp isn't more prominent here ?

OU812

Was looking up reviews & trip advisor seems to have the Irish market sewn up, however yelp is tightly integrated into OSX.

It seems to me to be a slightly more balanced review platform & is faster for searching. Can't figure out why it didn't crack the irish market.

jmcc

Ireland's a small market when it comes to this kind of operation and there are many smaller competitors who have the advantage of being local.

Regards...jmcc

RobGJ

I think part of it might be to do with restaurants/whatever pushing TripAdvisor more than Yelp..Why that is the case here though I'm not too sure..

PaulPinnacle

jmcc wrote: »

Ireland's a small market when it comes to this kind of operation and there are many smaller competitors who have the advantage of being local.

While I don't disagree with this being (at least one of) the reason(s), I disagree with the logic of it. At least where the target market includes, or in some cases is entirely made up of, tourists it is most certainly the wrong decision. Many of these tourists have a strong personal preference for sites such as Yelp. They enjoy and trust the community on 'their site' far more than any other. Having positive reviews on Yelp can make a difference to attracting this type of customer and is something that Irish businesses should be focusing on more.

In many cases I've dealt with, the business owners just aren't aware of Yelp. TripAdvisor seems to have managed to 'do a Facebook' and the vast majority are now aware of it (sadly many still don't use/push it). Yelp is still playing catch up, especially here in Ireland.

jmcc

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

In many cases I've dealt with, the business owners just aren't aware of Yelp. TripAdvisor seems to have managed to 'do a Facebook' and the vast majority are now aware of it (sadly many still don't use/push it). Yelp is still playing catch up, especially here in Ireland.

At an index page level, it is more common to find Irish sites/businesses linking to Facebook. I'll do a query for tripadvisor later (doing the monthly gTLD stats updates at the moment.) I'm trying to remember if I even saw Yelp links in the July survey.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Ran that query on the July Irish webscape data and 640 index page links to Tripadvisor were found. The figure for Yelp.ie was 53.

Regards...jmcc

OU812

That's interesting. They really should look at marketing it better here.

I find trip advisor more "trip centric" (unsurprisingly) hotels etc. although it does have other reviews there, they're not as good.

Add in the fact that apple use yelp for locations etc, they really need to up their game.

jmcc

OU812 wrote: »

That's interesting. They really should look at marketing it better here.

I find trip advisor more "trip centric" (unsurprisingly) hotels etc. although it does have other reviews there, they're not as good.

Add in the fact that apple use yelp for locations etc, they really need to up their game.

These are outbound links to Tripadvisor and Yelp. Despite the efforts of SEOs, the Irish webscape is still relatively poorly linked. The other factor is that since these are review sites, the website owner has no real control over them and as such they might not want to link to them.

Regards...jmcc

PaulPinnacle

To be fair to many of the business owners, the lack of awareness of Yelp can be slightly explained by the fact that they've never done any type of marketing or awareness campaigns here in the Irish market.

The problem there is that the Irish market is so small on a global scale that they never will do it here. The target customers that Yelp could reach will continue to use it and the business owners who aren't aware of it (which in turn shows they don't monitor what competitors are doing and industry best practice) will continue to miss out on the benefits of it.

Whether it's to provide the information where the market wants it or whether it's in terms of optimising for local search, a huge number of Irish businesses should be pushing Yelp and ensuring both they and their customers are aware of it.

jmcc

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Whether it's to provide the information where the market wants it or whether it's in terms of optimising for local search, a huge number of Irish businesses should be pushing Yelp and ensuring both they and their customers are aware of it.

Most Irish website owners have the bare minimum of metadata in their sites. The whole SEO thing has passed most of them by because they use their website as a substitute for print advertising. Approximately 23% of Irish websites are unchanged over the space of a year.

Regards...jmcc

PaulPinnacle

jmcc wrote: »

Approximately 23% of Irish websites are unchanged over the space of a year.

Really? That figure is actually a lot lower than I would have guessed or expected. I'd have been less surprised if you'd said that only 23% HAD made a change in the last year.

jmcc

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Really? That figure is actually a lot lower than I would have guessed or expected. I'd have been less surprised if you'd said that only 23% HAD made a change in the last year.

Well the webscape is stranger than people think. The other aspect is that thousands of domains drop each month and thousands new appear. Comparing the August 2012 lists with the August 2013 lists of Irish hosters, 74,796 domains were dropped/moved since August 2012 and 87,098 are new/transferred in since August 2012. The August 2012 domain count was 357,981 and the August 2013 count was 370,283. Not all domains have active websites so the active Irish webscape would be less than half of the number of domains registered at any time.

I've been working on a new version of WhoisIreland.com with these stats and the link analysis for each website. I should have it online in the next week once I get the gTLD stats update finished.

Regards...jmcc