My parents are both real estate agents in Lafayette, CA.  Citing my own usage of the Yelp, as well as my typical “why not be on every site you can be?” stance, about a year ago I encouraged them to create a local business profile on the local search site.  They sure are glad they took five minutes to do so, this past week they just closed their first transaction from a lead that originated at Yelp.  Not a bad ROI considering it’s free.

My parents’ clients were from San Francisco where Yelp originally started, and is immensely popular (not that it’s shabby elsewhere, they did 39M unique visitors in November).  Despite Yelp not having a stronghold in Lafayette (a suburb of San Francisco), that’s how people look for many local businesses in the big city.  It’s natural that as these people started to expand their home search outside of San Francisco, and started to look into delray beach real estate they’d still use their go-to service to search in neighboring cities as well.  I suppose this illustrates the point that you should be where your potential clients are looking, even if it’s not the #1 local search resource for your town.

So take a few minutes out of your busy day to sign-up for a Yelp listing for your business (and any other local search sites in your area).  The internet is a big place, you never know where that next lead turned to real business will come from…