Welcome to Australia, Yelp!
Simon Betschel | 30 November 2011I’d like to officially welcome Yelp to Australia today, a global leader in local ratings and reviews. I encourage everyone to visit www.yelp.com.au and share their experiences of local businesses by posting ratings and reviews.
Why rate and review? Aside from the fact that it’s the fun and easy way to talk about great (and not so great) local businesses, it’s sites like Yelp that are playing a big part in how we Aussies make purchasing decisions these days.
According to the Sensis® Social Media Report, social networkers read an average of six reviews before making a buying decision. So rather than waiting for a review of a business to be published online or in the local paper and then deciding whether or not to give the business a go, we are getting on the front foot and seeking these reviews out for ourselves. Yelp.com.au makes this very easy.
Yelp first started in San Francisco in 2004 and today’s launch in Australia marks the 13th country it has opened its online doors in. In Q3 2011 the online ratings and reviews company received an average of 61 million visitors a month (up 63 per cent from the same time last year), has generated 22 million reviews on its global network as of September 2011 (an increase of 66 per cent over the same time in 2010) and saw an average of five million unique views a month on its mobile app. With results like these, it’s evident that ratings and reviews are becoming an increasingly important component of consumers’ pre-purchase behaviour.
While I’m personally excited about Yelp’s launch in Australia today, it’s also a big coup for Sensis®’ Yellow Pages®, after announcing our ground-breaking partnership with Yelp back in July.
Yellow Pages® local business listing data has been integrated into Yelp.com.au (including mobile site and apps), which means our Yellow Pages® advertisers will be able to be found by more potential customers. And in a couple of weeks, Yelp Reviews and Ratings will be displayed on Yellow Pages® Online and Mobile. I’ll tell you more about that shortly. In the meantime, visit www.yelp.com.au to rate and review a local business near you.
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In April, Sensis ran a ground-breaking campaign that really brought the value of Yellow Pages® to life. The campaign worked a bit like this. Team up with well-known Melbourne pizza chef, Tony Fazio. Open a restaurant offering free pizza for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone the address or phone number. Instead tell them to “look it up the way you would any other business”. Then sit back and watch the dough fly.
As you may know, Telstra recently released the home phone of the future, the T-Hub. This is great for buyers and sellers using our services because White Pages®, Yellow Pages® and 1234 (with Whereis® coming soon) are all easily accessible right where your phone is. Just one touch of the console and you’re searching. And when you find the result in Yellow Pages®, you don’t even have to dial… just click to call.
We launched a new CitySearch® Mobile site, with an improved look and feel, expanded TV and Movies content, a new ‘Bars’ vertical and improved mapping functionality. And we also launched new Yellow Pages® and White Pages® apps for Android devices to complement the incredibly successful launch of our iPhone apps.
Now, we’ve taken this a step further with the release of a new book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth. This free book, which is a complement to our highly successful advertising guide, provides practical information on how businesses can reduce their impact on the environment and save money as well.
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.
The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.
Sensis Sustainability Report
Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.






