Editor’s Note:  This capability no longer exists. Yelp has removed the RSS feeds feature for business pages.  Please visit Yelp API page for other ways you can use Yelp. 

Here’s an easy, free way to monitor your business reputation online.

If you have a business, surely you want to know what people are saying about it online.  But staying abreast of all of the forum posts, customer reviews, or blog discussions that mention your business can be overwhelming.  We recommend consolidating all of this info onto an iGoogle page.  Why iGoogle?  Simply because this is already the homepage for so many people.

Here are step by step instructions for adding a feed to your iGoogle page:

1: Create a Google Account

Instructions can be found here.

2: Choose a feed page

Different businesses will need to monitor different venues.  A restaurant should probably be watching reviews on Yelp or Chowhound, while a hotel will monitor Tripadvisor and a software firm may watch conversations in relevant forums.  Let’s suppose your business is  Fuel City Tacos, in Dallas TX.  A search for your business name on Google shows reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Chowhound, as seen here:

Let’s choose Yelp for today’s tutorial.

2: Sign up for the Feed

With your company’s reviews page open in the browser, Look for the RSS feed icon next to the address bar where the page URL is displayed.  In Firefox, the icon looks like this:

Click on the feed icon and open the feed URL in a new window.  Select “Subscribe to this feed using Google”

Finally, select, “Add to Google Homepage”

3: Enjoy Your Feed on your iGoogle Homepage

Here’s how the Fuel City Yelp feed looks:

Keeping an eye on your reviews is a big first step in the important ongoing task of monitoring and managing your business’s online word of mouth presence.   We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful!