Yelp is ranking above our own site for our restaurant brand. Can this be changed?

Yelp outranking a restaurant’s own site for its brand name is common and not, by itself, a crisis. Yelp’s pages are built precisely to rank for local business names, so the productive response is to control the results you can own rather than trying to displace Yelp head-on.

Manage the page, don’t fight Yelp

A branded search is a whole page, not a single blue link. The goal is to make sure the business owns the assets it controls so that Yelp becomes one option among several rather than the default destination.

1. Strengthen the corporate site. Improve the site’s authority and on-page signals so it holds the top organic position for the brand name.
2. Fully optimize the Google Business Profile. More important for a local business: complete and accurate information, correct categories, current photos, regular posts, and responses to reviews, so the business owns the Map pack and the Knowledge Panel that appear above or beside the organic results.

Why the Business Profile does the heavy lifting

• Complete, accurate profile information makes a business more likely to show up in local search results.
• The profile drives the local Map pack and feeds the Knowledge Panel, the prominent elements a user sees first for a brand-name search.
• More reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and responding to reviews keeps the profile active.

A user searching the restaurant should see the business’s own panel and Maps presence prominently, with Yelp as one option among several. We track the full branded result set with IMPACT™, including the local pack, so the picture is the whole page and not just the organic links.