Claiming Your Yelp Listings

Yelp has been growing quickly in the online world, mainly for its customer-driven review functionality. Many credit unions may be surprised to find themselves listed on Yelp – with pictures. This is because members can create pages for locations if  they do not already exist.

Here are the steps to getting listed on Yelp:

1. Navigate to https://biz.yelp.com/support/claiming which gives an overview of the process for claiming your business. Claiming a yelp business is a very straightforward process, provided your listing telephone number is correct. Choose Claim Your Business:
2. Type in the name of your business on this page:

There are three possible scenarios for this branch – follow the steps for your situation:

• Your branch is there and ready to be claimed – go to Step 3
• Your branch is there and already claimed – go to Step 4
• Your branch is not there at all – go to Step 5

3. If you found it and it has not been claimed click on “Claim This Business”

• The next screen will prompt you to select the way you’d like Yelp to contact you to verify that you own the listing. Unless you can receive texts to the branch phone number (rather unlikely…), choose the Call me at… option – note that you have the ability to add an extension, which means the verification call can be routed directly to you as needed.
• When you select the Call me option, a new screen will appear with a code. When the phone rings, you will be asked to enter that code. Immediately, your screen will refresh and confirm that you’ve claimed the listing!

• If it says it has already been claimed, call this number: (877) 767-9357 (Yes, they will try to sell you advertising, reiterate that you just want to clean up your listing first).
  • The line will say you’ve reached Yelp Advertising – after providing your language choice, you’ll be routed to a real live human being. You’ll be asked to provide your phone number from the listing.
  • Explain to them that the person who claimed the listing is no longer at the credit union and you need to claim it. They will ask you to email them from your credit union official email address (the support rep will give you their contact details – not a list, but their work address!) and state:
    • “Hello, This is First Name Last Name, my email address is last@yourcreditunion.com, the person who previously ran our Yelp account is no longer with the business, please add me as the account contact.” They will enable reclaiming and email you back directly with confirmation that you can officially claim that branch.

5. If you could not find your business, click “Add Your Business to Yelp” .
   • Fill out the form with your business information and then click “Add Business”.
   • You will be sent an e-mail to confirm the
   • The e-mail will bring you back to Yelp where, you need to click through to see your
   • You will not be able to officially claim the business as your own until it populates on search results, which can take 1-5 days according to a Yelp specialist we spoke with.
   • After that time, you will need to create a Yelp Business Owners Login.
   • To find it, go to your listing and at the VERY top of your screen, you will see a red flag that says “Go to Yelp for Business Owners,” click on it

5. • Click the Login option at the top of the Yelp for Business Owners Page. Follow the steps to create a Yelp Business Owners Account
     • After creating the account, call (877) 767-9357, if you hang on the line you will get a LIVE PERSON!
     • Explain to them that you want to link your newly created business listing with your business
     • PLEASE NOTE: If you have fewer than 10 locations, Yelp creates for you a Local Business Manager Account, if you have more than 10 locations, you need a National account (depending on who you talk to, they call it different things).

Callahan Tested: When originally going through this process, when we hit the 10 business location threshold, Yelp literally paused our account and gave us a number to call. They will insist on selling you advertising. The only way we could get around this was to convince them that we were not in charge of marketing, but in charge of cleaning up business listings. We told them we would work on getting them a meeting with our marketing team if they could help us out. That meeting never happened, but we did get the National Business account we needed..