We’re excited to have interviewed Yelp Partner expert Peter Huber, from Yelp, for the next installment of our Featured SEO Expert Series!
Peter Huber works in the partnership division of Yelp. He uses his prior experience and knowledge of working for small businesses to approach agencies from a client-first consulting standpoint. He maintains a monthly six-figure billing across all local Yelp verticals, such as HVAC, plumbing, contracting, restaurants and laywers.
Could you describe the benefits of joining the Yelp Advertising Partner Program?
“The Yelp Advertising Partner Program is all about forming a meaningful partnership between Yelp and marketing agencies and enabling them to leverage our platform effectively to drive leads for their clients. We empower firms to provide professional campaign management through a single point of contact at Yelp, which leads to strategic and ROI-driven results to meet the objectives of your clients.
“Yelp Partners are given pre- and post-sales support to help them effectively sell and manage ad campaigns that maximize results for their clients. Bundled pricing, upgrades and ad credits only available through the partnership are also offered to agencies to give them the tools they need to sell this on their own. We also train agencies on using tools like video hosting, UTM tracking and API integrations to connect them with the consumers. Our dedicated team of customer success agents work together with our partner team to optimize listings, campaigns and tracking to the fullest.”
What trends in Yelp advertising do you predict for 2022?
“The hottest trends we’ve seen towards the end of 2021 and heading into 2022 are in the home, food and beauty verticals. Our data science team is constantly searching for services people are looking for on Yelp, and then providing our partner team with this data to direct revenue to those categories and searches.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in people taking care of their mental and physical health. Beauty trends are also becoming more popular across social media platforms.”
What is the ideal SEO agency for Yelp’s Advertising Partner Program?
“There is no model agency for the Yelp Advertising Partner Program since every agency is constructed differently, and we welcome the opportunity to work with independent thinkers.
“However, if I were to construct the perfect partner agency, their services would include a history of PPC management and campaign management on other paid advertising channels, like Google Ads and social media. Ideally, this agency would already have B2C clients in the professional, local, auto and home services categories of Yelp, which we affectionately call our ‘PLAH’ categories. Of course, restaurants and the foodservice industry are always popular on Yelp, as well!”
Can you give an example of a successful agency partnership currently in place?
“VIIRL Marketing is one of the top partner agencies in our program. They have given us the opportunity to do a few branded case studies on their clients. Their website is also a perfect example of taking the marketing collateral we provide and attracting new clients.”
What are your primary strategies for growing the Yelp Advertising Program?
“From a partnership perspective, there are many ways to approach growth. We focus not only on the acquisition of new partners and the onboarding of their clients but also on the expansion of current partners’ client lists through ongoing support. Yelp’s Partner Program provides collateral for agencies to post on their websites and other social media outlets to let potential clients know their offerings and specialties. Partners also have the ability to use Partner account managers and directors to co-sell with them and be their Yelp subject matter expert whenever necessary.”
What’s the best advice you ever received in business?
“I’ve received what I perceive to be a lot of great business advice, but one of the most helpful I’ve found is to be consistent in everything. Be consistent in your outreach, follow-up, value-add to a client or partner and your own schedule. By making yourself valuable to your partners and clients, you become reliable and build up trust. Not everything is going to be equal all the time, so by establishing trust through consistency, you can give and receive information with an understanding that your partner or client is working towards the same end goal with you.”
What’s the most important quality for making an agency truly great?
“The most successful agencies both in revenue and client success have a few things in common – at the heart of which is really ensuring they are effectively using Yelp as an effective lead source for their clients. Consistency in using the dashboard and checking in on client campaigns regularly is crucial. The best agencies regularly go through factors such as keyword targeting, changing pictures and looking at click-through rates on each of the clickable links on a listing to see what people are looking at the most.
“Additionally, the best agencies also have plans in place for their existing and new clients. By this, I mean they take advantage of the free boost spend Yelp’s ad partnership provides, and they make sure their clients are hitting certain spend levels across the board to get the best combination of savings and boost to promote their listings over the competition. Having a plan in place for certain verticals makes the process of optimizing a listing much easier and more efficient since they know the industry-standard key performance indicators (KPIs) at certain spend levels and can give metrics to new clients based on their historical data.”
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