First: Get Your Free Business Page on Yelp
Before we get started talking about Yelp Ads, you should definitely get a free listing for your garage door business on Yelp. It allows you to get another presence for your brand online. You’ll be able to enter information about your business including your hours, how people can make contact, and the services your business offers.
You’ll need to get garage door repair reviews as part of an effective garage door marketing program. By claiming and monitoring your Yelp business page, you’ll be able to properly manage your Yelp reviews.
Getting a free business page is also the first step towards advertising with Yelp.
Overview of Yelp Ads for Garage Services
While Yelp’s claim to fame is being a review platform for restaurants, it also has an advertising platform that can possibly help small businesses – including garage door contractors – get more local leads. Yelp Ads may be a good fit for garage door repair marketing on the Internet – at least for some contractors. The purpose of this post is to show you the advertising tools that Yelp makes available to garage door service providers.
There are two main ways to pay to promote your business on Yelp:
1) Yelp Pay Per Click Ads
With Yelp Pay Per Click Ads, you run ads that appear on the Yelp search results. When someone clicks on your ad, they are taken to your Garage Door Company page on Yelp. You will incur a fee each time someone clicks on your ad
2) Yelp Page Upgrades
Yelp page upgrades allow you to add features to your company page to allow you to potentially more effectively promote your services to garage door prospects. These upgrades also tend to make it easier for prospects to contact you to repair their garage door.
We’ll go in-depth on both of these paid offerings in a moment, but first, let’s take a look at Yelp Search results and Yelp Business Pages.
Ads in Yelp Search Results
But first….
Before I get started, I wanted to provide a quick note about clicking on sponsored ads. If you’re analyzing garage door competitors, do what I did for this post. Don’t click on sponsored results on Yelp if you’re doing research. Yelp is a pay-per-click platform, and by clicking on ads, you’ll be costing companies money. Only click on sponsored results if you’re actually looking for services from businesses that are advertising on Yelp.
Now Let’s get started…
Sponsored Results
I start the process by searching for “garage door repair” near my location in Douglas County, Colorado.
Yelp provides us the search results with the title “Best garage door repair in Douglas County, CO”. Like Google and Bing search engines, Yelp shows us ads first – as you can see by the “Sponsored Results” in the image below.
All Results
In my search, there were 20 total listings – 10 ads for garage door services companies followed by 10 business listings for garage door companies. You have to scroll down very far to see the “all results” listings which aren’t ads. Even so, the first 5 results in “all results” also had ads in the sponsored section above.
Clicking on a Listing
Regardless of whether you click on a business listing from the sponsored section – or if you click on a result from the “All Results” section, you will be taken to the business owner’s business page on Yelp. From there, you can make contact with the business. The advertiser is charged whenever someone clicks on their ad.
Ads on Yelp Business Pages
In addition to the Yelp Search Results page, ads may also appear on the listings for other pages. There is an upgrade option where business owners can pay to not have competitor’s ads on their listing. But for those who don’t pay to remove competing companies, ads can appear in the middle of your listing, the bottom of your listing, and along the right-hand column as shown below.
Yelp Ads – The Details
We’ve already seen what ads look like in Yelp from the search page and on business pages – now we’re going to discuss signing up and running garage door services ads on Yelp.
I’m assuming that you already signed up for a free Yelp account as mentioned at the beginning of this post. To start running ads, you’ll click on “Yelp Ads” from the left-hand column once you’re logged in (shown below).
Select Yelp Ad Campaign Goal
Next, you’ll have the option to set a goal for your campaign. Your options are shown below. Advertising platforms like to offer an option for the ad platform to decide what’s best for your business by taking care of the options for you. You can click “Let Yelp optimize” if you trust Yelp to properly make decisions with your ad budget for you.
For our purposes, I’m selecting “Get more phone calls” below. I like to have a little bit more control over my advertising activities rather than trusting the advertising platform to spend my budget wisely. The goal for your garage door company is to get prospective customers to contact you. This makes get more phone calls or get more website clicks good choices.
Write Your Ad Text
This next screen allows you to write up to 1500 characters for your ad text – which may appear (at least partially) in ads shown in the search results and on business listings. You’ll want to feature services as well as differentiators within this text. Maybe include items like emergency services, 24×7 services, as well as specific components you replace or fix. Examples would be to include garage door openers, torsion springs, rollers, etc.
Choose Your Keyword Searches
From the next screen, you’ll get to choose the keywords that you want your garage door ad to show for. Note that you can’t use custom garage door keywords, Yelp will have a ready made list assembled. Click on any keywords that aren’t applicable and they will appear on the bottom – meaning these keywords won’t trigger your ads. As you add or remove keywords, your audience size will grow or contract as you can see in the meter on the right.
You can see sample keywords below for landscapers. In this case, ads will show for searches related to irrigation and landscaping, but won’t show for snow removal or awnings.
Choose What Geographic Regions See Your Ad
There are two ways to choose who see your ads – by location (zip, city, neighborhood) and by radius around your business. Below, you can see that we’re targeting based on counties in the Denver metro area.
These targeting options will allow you to precisely target your preferred target audience.
Budget & Billing
Yelp will then give you daily budgeting options. These can start as low as $5/day depending on your location – and your service type. You’ll also have the chance to upgrade your advertising with the upgrade options (discussed later in this post).
Once your budget is complete, you’ll have the option to add your billing information and start running ads.
Yelp Page Upgrades
Part of Yelp Ads
The upgrades below are all part of Yelp Ads. The price starts at $1/day for each of these upgrades. You can get discounts (up to 60%) by bundling multiple upgrades. Here’s my breakdown of the available upgrades and how they may – or may not – be a good option for Garage Door Services companies.
Logo
You can add your logo to your business listing as shown on the garage door company page below (A).
While having a logo is important for a garage door company business, I’m not sure there’s much value in adding a logo to your Yelp page. A major exception is if you own a franchise with major brand recognition. Seeing a familiar logo could definitely help with conversions.
Over the years I’ve found that many business owners are extremely proud of their logo and make sure that it is overrepresented (way too big) on their website. A garage door prospect has an emergency that needs to be fixed and likely won’t care about the proper use of orange and blue in your logo. As long as it looks professional, you’re fine. I almost certainly wouldn’t pay extra to have my logo presented on Yelp.
Yelp Connect
It appears that Yelp Connect was originally rolled out to restaurants in response to COVID, now appears to be available to other companies – possibly including garage door repair businesses. What Yelp Connect allows you to do is to post updates with detailed information and photos about your business.
The screenshot below is from a brewery here in Denver.
When you expand on the update, the visitor sees a larger photo and the full text of the update.
I didn’t see any garage door repair owners posting updates using Yelp Connect, and I’m not sure it would be the best fit. I think it is essential that Garage Door companies keep their website’s blog and Google Business profile listing updated with the great work they’re doing. However, I’m not so sure that paying to have an update posted on Yelp would be helpful for your business.
Call to Action
A button that gets a customer to take action – for garage door repair companies, there are two primary uses for a call to action button:
1) Schedule an Appointment
A visitor to your Yelp Business page would click on the Schedule an Appointment button to be taken to your website where they can get on your schedule for you to repair their garage door.
2) Call Now
In this case, the button could be used to connect a Yelp user directly with your team by phone.
Below you can see an example of what call to action buttons look like on a Yelp listing
In the screenshot below, you can see the default call to action for visitors that aren’t actively advertising. Notice that visitors to your web page are nudged to contact someone other than you with the “Reach out to Similar Pros” headline.
Business Highlights
Business highlights allow garage door owners to select 6 of up to 30 highlights to make their listing stand out a bit more. It allows a prospective customer to get a quick understanding of some of the factors that differentiate you from your competition.
Remove Competitor Ads
By default, most garage door repair business pages will have ads for competing garage door companies embedded within the middle of their business listing and at the bottom of the page. There are also typically sponsored results by competitors along the right-hand side of Yelp listings.
When you choose to have competitor ads removed, these ads will no longer distract users from your business listing content. They’ll be more likely to view your listing and stay on your page as opposed to clicking on your garage door company’s competitors.
Of all the upgrades to consider, this may be one of the best options. When someone is on your website, your Google Business profile page, or your Yelp Business page, you want them to take action and make contact with you. By eliminating all of the links to your competitors from your own Yelp page, you will almost certainly increase the chances of them making contact with you.
Photo Slideshow
As with most advertising platforms, Yelp is constantly changing its offerings. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the Photo slideshow offers.
During my research, I came across restaurants that had a photo slideshow at the very top of their listing. I didn’t find any garage door companies that had a similar photo slideshow at the top of their listing
An example of this top-of-page photo slideshow is shown for this FireHouse Subs shop below.
Personally, I don’t like this slideshow option as I find it somewhat distracting. Even though there is a gradient on top of the photos to allow the text to stand out, it makes it a little bit challenging to read the text on top of the photos.
As the owner of a garage door company, I don’t know that I would opt into this particular slideshow option.
Yelp does offer free photo uploads. Your garage door company should definitely upload photos to this free photo gallery to showcase your work.
Portfolio
Portfolios on websites are extremely powerful – you should have an extensive portfolio of all of the services that you offer – in the locations where you performed those services. By documenting your work with video and photos, prospects know that you’ve been there, done that, and can fix their garage door problems.
You should already be doing this and posting photos from your garage door projects on your website. As an example, you should have multiple project portfolios on your own site for the following types of services
- New garage door installation
- Torsion Spring Replacement
- Garage door extension spring replacement
- New garage door opener install
- Pulley and cable replacement
- Fixing remote garage door openers
- Fixing off-track garage doors
- Garage door roller replacement and maintenance
Yelp has a portfolio option that allows you to do basically add all these projects that should already be on your website and put them on your Yelp Business listing.
Showcasing your work is good practice – I like the portfolio option as one of the better Yelp Ads offerings.
Verified License
This feature displays a “verified license” badge that appears in the paid and free search results when someone searches for garage door services in certain states. You must have a valid license in your location. You’ll then apply for the badge with Yelp which will verify your license.
You can see below that the license really stands out in a business listing. You can click on the license badge to get more information about the license.
Having a license may be a good Yelp advertising upgrade option. It could help you to differentiate your garage door companies from others in your area. In some locations, users might expect to see the license on your listing, making it a good idea to make sure that you have one.
Yelp Ads for Garage Door Services: Wrap Up
Yelp has changed its advertising options significantly over the years which may in some cases make Yelp Ads a good fit for your garage door business.
There are a lot of garage door advertisers running ads on Yelp here in the Denver metro area. Anecdotally, that seems to indicate that they’re having some success advertising on Yelp and getting a return on their ad budget. However, not all business owners watch the numbers as close as they should, so it is hard to know for sure.
Before Running Ads on Yelp
I would always start with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and SEO and get those marketing channels well-tuned prior to exploring running ads on Yelp.
If you’re interested in running ads, I would strongly recommend you speak with other Yelp garage door advertisers in cities that are about the same size as yours. For example, if you’re in Phoenix, you may wish to call garage services companies in Dallas or Nashville that are advertising on Yelp. Try to get a feel for how much they’re getting in return for their budget. This will also give you an idea of what works well with Yelp, and what isn’t all that great.
