How to Create a Business Directory Website Like Yelp

adminMarch 24, 2023

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To create a corporate directory website like Yelp

If you need a doctor, lawyer, barber, or caterer for your wedding, how do you usually look for the right people?

It’s good to have recommendations from friends and family , but what if you’re new to a town and don’t have any acquaintances? Or what if all recommended specialists are not available for a long time? Or do you just want to compare prices and services?

Reading: How to create a website like yelp

For these and other reasons, a company catalog with contacts and ratings would be helpful for your selection process.

On the other side is every service With hundreds, thousands or even millions of entrepreneurs represented, companies are struggling to get their place displayed in as many places as possible to find customers. Because of this, creating business directories has become an elegant solution that is helpful for both clients and businesses. A number of such online catalogs have been operating successfully for years.

So, is it worth getting into this competitive business and building sites like Yelp? If your answer is yes, let’s find out all the secrets of business directory website development!

What is a business directory?

If we delve deeper into the history of business promotion, we will note that the first registers date from the end of the 19th century and were printed on yellow paper. “Yellow Pages” soon became the name for the printed telephone directories in which companies could advertise themselves.

Later, when everything went online, “Yellow Pages” were transformed into business directory websites.

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Today, what we mean by business directory (or citation site) is a website that lists companies within niche categories. This market is represented by a variety of global and local websites. The main ones are Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yellow Pages, OpenTable, BBB and hundreds more. If you are considering this line of business for your own startup, we will show you the most important aspects to consider.

A way to differentiate yourself from the already established competitors and those who build websites like Yelp occupies a narrow niche, such as business directories for:

Luxury Hotels
Yachts, Cargo and Shopping
Restaurants that only serve a specific type of Food
Rare doctors who prescribe a specific drug or practice alternative medicine
Lawyers specializing in a specific legal practice
Events for small groups of people, etc .

Another idea is to build a better website than your competitors with creative unique features and better user experience. But we’ll talk about that later in this article. First, let’s take a look at the different components of apps like Yelp to understand how they work from the inside.

Yelp Overview

Below we will examine the field of business directories, using Yelp as an example of one of the most popular websites category with more than 148 million reviews of various services and 142 million unique visitors per month.

Yelp was founded in 2004 in San Francisco, California by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. The domain name results from the combination of “Yellow Pages” and “Help”. The name “Yelp” seemed short, memorable, and meaningful. Now the platform is available in 32 countries around the world and about 4,000 people work for the company.

The main difference between Yelp and other business directories is that it focuses on how users interact with each other and with companies concentrated. Users can write reviews, consider others’ comments, make friends, earn points, attend Yelp Elite parties, and more.

According to the Yelp 2020 Financial Report, net income at the end of 2020 was $872 million.

Why create a business directory site like Yelp?

There are many ways to monetize this type of business. Let’s see how you can make money with a business directory website:

1. Advertising This method brings in up to 80% of Yelp’s total revenue. Directories may sell:

Higher visibility of listings in search queries
Placement on the highest traffic pages
Placement on competitor’s sites
Ability to pay to remove a competitor placement from your business page
Use of cross-platform advertising (mobile and desktop presence)

2. Transactions

Businesses can use offers and other gift certificates to attract more customers. In this case, Yelp takes 30% of the deals and 10% of the certificate price.

3.Subscription

Yelp allows users to book restaurant tables, food and flower deliveries, and appointments with doctors and lawyers. To this end, businesses can choose between options on Yelp’s transaction platform. Therefore, the platform charges $249 per month for the Yelp Reservations feature, which allows its customers to make bookings directly on Yelp through third-party providers.

4. Other Services

Profile Enhancement

Yelp offers the ability to enhance a business profile with features such as the following: Add more photos, videos, slideshows, and call-to-action buttons; highlighting a favorite rating; Posting a special offer, removing competitor’s ads from their site, etc.

Marketing Services

When entrepreneurs have some difficulty with Create and maintaining social media campaigns and communities on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, the business directory platforms can take over these tasks for an additional payment. These services also include web design, photography, and other marketing.

Analytical Services

Business directories may provide integrated analytics tools that businesses can use help to monitor performance (user traffic, click-through rate, revenue estimate) and strategically plan your next steps.

How to create a local search directory like Yelp

The sites similar to Yelp , are characterized by a common set of core functions. Let’s start with the characteristics of the minimum viable products (MVP) and then move on to the additional and unique ones.

Basic characteristics

Once you have decided how to make and attract money want an audience, you can proceed to creating product requirements to create a directory website.

1. Creating Listings

The most important thing to figure out when building a website like Yelp is how to build your database of listings. You can either wait for site visitors to do it themselves (but don’t expect quick results), or you can add entries yourself (manually or using web scraping techniques) and then rely on users to proceed .

Adding information about a company for free is a very attractive opportunity for entrepreneurs as it allows them to market without spending a penny. Additional charges may apply for advanced features such as the ability to add multiple listings, locations, contacts, more photos and videos.

However, if you allow businesses to register for free, beware of bots and fake listings beware. To prevent fraud, Yelp verifies its users by calling the numbers entered in the account and prompting owners to enter a verification code.

Launch a directory website with a minimal set of required fields. Initially, this can be personal and contact information, as well as company descriptions. Later you can extend this functionality with more options.

2. Search and filter

With a database containing several thousand entries, it would be impossible to find the necessary information without a search engine. Search plays one of the most important roles in creating a website like Yelp, as it should provide results that match exactly what the user needs.

Yelp’s search sorts the data by relevance, taking into account location and many other factors. When searching by location, a user can choose from predefined options such as Nearby (identified by the user’s current location), At Home (address specified in the user’s profile), or Saved Locations (added by the user addresses) and saved in their profile).

If “Nearby” is selected, the system searches for the entries that are within a defined radius around the user. To enable this feature, the system should have information about the user’s geolocation. If you ask users for access to their location, you should explain the purpose so they don’t decline. Without coordinates, the “Nearby” feature won’t work properly.

Besides coordinates, people should be able to search and filter by other factors. With a wide variety of types of businesses advertised on the platform, it is helpful to introduce filters by category, alphabet, price, rating, location, distance, working hours, etc.

3. Reviews

When creating a website like Yelp, keep in mind that one of the purposes of the business directory is to rank service providers based on customer reviews. A business owner or manager should be able to receive the reviews and respond to them with a personal message or public comment.

On Yelp, users can also search reviews to quickly find the information they need. There is keyword search and search by language through written and posted reviews.

Fraud detection is one of the most common challenges to consider before building a site like Yelp.Fake feedback (spam or paid reviews) can ruin your service’s reputation or even lead to lawsuits.

Yelp states that businesses cannot pay to add or remove reviews. Their algorithms classify ratings into 3 categories:

Recommended (71%): considered true and displayed first in the list
Not recommended (22%): suspicious and placed on the second page; these are usually reviews from users with little activity or reviews from the same device
Removed (7%): not shown

Re To identify fake and spam reviews, developers use many techniques such as IP verification, blacklisting of suspicious emails and phone numbers, verification by zip code, and checking reviews for known behavioral patterns.

At Greenice, to launch a directory website create, we use best practices for detecting fake reviews, reporting unusual behavior and removing spam. We filter emails, phone numbers and content generated by bots in order to send them to blacklists.

For our project NoCowboys, a website that groups traders from New Zealand, we carried out a very simple registration process. Users who want to write a review just need to enter their email address to sign up. With an email address, we can verify that it is a real person (not a bot) and give the company the opportunity to reply to the reviewer in the event of negative feedback, to ask questions or ask for proof.

These were the main features required to build a website like Yelp. Now let’s discuss how you can further improve your service.

Advanced and Unique Features

Building a website like Yelp is the next logical step after building MVP and testing its functionality. Start improving your platform with extras to make your service even more attractive and useful.

Let’s see what else you can do for your directory.

1. Delight Your Audience

When people like a restaurant, hotel or service, they often want to recommend it to everyone. At the same time, people who receive bad service want to share their experiences with the world. Most people willingly post ratings and comments without reward, on their own initiative, to share their point of view, improve their writing skills, or show expertise on a question, but there are also ways you can increase user motivation to write for your review website.

a) Engage your audience

Increase their engagement by offering your reviewers some interactivity. Yelp is not just a review site, it’s also a huge community of people (Yelpers) making friends, communicating, commenting on each other, rating reviews, etc. This is like other social media communities, connected by interests.

b) Incentivize users

Reward your audience with different types of awards: points, badges, status, discounts, freebies and invitations to try new company. Allow users to redeem points earned on business listings for goods.

For example, OpenTable allows users to exchange points for Amazon gift cards or meals at restaurants enrolled in the program.

Some services like Zomato have “leaderboards” to rank their users based on their activities (ratings, photos).

Yelp is famous for its Yelp Elite parties. Becoming a member requires being very active – writing lots of reviews (at least 40 quality reviews per year), making friends, and actively communicating with other Yelpers.

2. Add more value to your user experience

If you want to create a website similar to Yelp, let your service be not only a place for people to review companies, but also a useful tool to submit their reviews makes life easier.

a) Book

The “Reserve” function allows users to book a table in a restaurant, rental car or hotel reserve rooms directly from the citation page. This is much more convenient for users as they don’t have to go to a separate website for each company and waste time trying to figure out how to make a reservation.

b) Increase loyalty

Yelp enables businesses to use features such as “Yelp WiFi”, a custom home page at the entrance to the free WiFi connection in a property (hotel, restaurant). This feature can collect valuable customer information such as emails, phone numbers, and social media links to make it easier to stay in touch with customers. However, do not forget to ask users for their permission to collect, store and process personal data. For example, send them notifications, special offers, and invitations.

How much does it cost the Building a Business Directory Website?

The next important question is how much it should cost to build a website like Yelp. Let’s roughly estimate the MVP features that are characteristic of almost all websites of this type. All additional features vary from project to project and these prices should be calculated individually.

Feature Description Authentication and user profiling Each person can register log in and enter their information to submit listings and reviews Search Search records in the database Submission of reviews Customers should be able to rate the Service and write a review a business owner should be able to respond to that. User verification Anti-spam, anti-bot procedures Admin functionality Admin can manage all data on the website CMS Content management systems help with Adding and Editing Content on Blogs and Around the Site

It’s also important to note that the cost doesn’t depend on how many developers you need to build a site like Yelp, but on the scope of the features in yours Requirements. Building an MVP of an enterprise directory with the features mentioned in the table can take 3-6 months. If you build it from scratch, the development will cost you between $30,000 and $50,000 depending on the complexity. If you want to speed up development and lower price, we can suggest using white label solution and template design. In this case, the basic functionality of a directory like Yelp can cost between $12,000 and $16,000. This price is approximate and based on our rate plan and previous experience developing review sites.

How to apply this to your business

An online business directory Website is a great way for small and medium-sized business owners to present themselves to a large audience. When developing a review website, you should consider serious competitors like Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc. But how do you create a website like Yelp without cloning it? There are always ways to stand out from the crowd.

If you’ve already explored market needs and determined that a niche or location doesn’t have a business directory, this is a startup opportunity.

For example, our client NoCowboys niche in handyman services and localized solely in New Zealand, narrowing their area and territory of specialization.

Forget blind copying from Yelp or OpenTable. Your strengths are unique selling propositions and the great usability of your product. At Greenice, we have in-depth expertise in building review websites with a complex backend. We hope we gave you some food for thought on creating a review site like Yelp.

Author: Anna Klimenko is a market researcher and author at Greenice with versatile Knowledge of different types of business and technical solutions. Anna’s experience in technical writing and product management allows her to understand web development processes and translate technical concepts into plain language to help entrepreneurs make informed decisions.