My best friend from high school (him closest to me in the middle) and I (to the left) started King of Maids in Chicago, IL, in 2013 with a combined investment of $6,000. Within three years, we crossed over $5,000,000 in revenue. I was 22 at the time, and I still remember how amazing of an achievement that was. That achievement allowed me to believe that big things are attainable and never to doubt yourself.
Now King of Maids Chicago is the most reviewed house cleaning service in the area. This one is also amazing because it took nearly 10 years to reach almost 500 reviews on Yelp and be the most-reviewed cleaning company in Chicago. If you're a business owner who uses Yelp, you also know how hard it is to get Yelp reviews.
It's not easy getting honest reviews on Yelp because of their strict algorithm that immediately filters out inactive accounts. When gaining reviews on Google, it's easy to buy them because everyone has a Gmail account, and often that Google account is very active. It's not the case with Yelp, where only a handful of people have good and active accounts. That is why I always go to Yelp whenever I want to try and find a good restaurant or service. It's more trustworthy, which is why many business owners dislike Yelp. Yelp is not perfect because it will filter actual, positive, good, and honest customer reviews, but it will do that because it's not sure if the account is trustworthy. As a result of having such a strict process, it is more likely to filter out fake reviews, which keeps business owners that write fake reviews off the platform. It makes it too hard and expensive to buy reviews only to get them filtered out by the Yelps algorithm.
When you think about it, it's much easier to find 10 friends and have them post 10 Google reviews for your business. Now try finding those 10 friends that have an active Yelp account. It will be much more difficult, and the moment they make a Yelp account, Yelp will flag it as a new account. If they don't start actively using it, that review will likely not stick. I'm not saying Google is bad, but from my experience, I find Yelp more trustworthy, which is why I find this achievement a big deal and why it took nearly 10 years to achieve.
Comments