Yelp has introduced Keyword Boosting, a feature that enables business owners to optimize their ads for specific keywords, the company announced Tuesday. Along with that feature, Yelp also expanded its Custom Location Targeting to more advertisers, enhanced its ad budgeting feature and added templates for Yelp Connect subscribers.

Introducing Keyword Boosting. This new feature allows local businesses to direct their ad budget at desired keywords (somewhat similar to keyword match types in Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising).

Business owners can select keywords to boost (or block) from the default keywords that Yelp uses to match ads to customer searches or input their own keywords. This feature can be used with Keyword Blocking, an existing Yelp feature that functions similar to a negative keyword list.

Keyword Boosting is available to all Yelp Ads customers and can be accessed from the Ads Dashboard.

Custom Location Targeting rolls out to all Yelp Ads customers. Now, all Yelp Ads customers can take advantage of Custom Location Targeting.

First announced in May 2021 for home and local services businesses, Custom Location Targeting enables business owners to designate specific locations for their ads to appear. Before this, they could only advertise in a radius around their location.

Enhanced ad budgeting. The company has also enhanced its budgeting feature by leveraging more data, such as rating, category, listing age and region. 

Yelp Connect templates. Yelp is also providing templates to subscribers of its Connect social publishing and advertising tool to help them write more effective posts.

Why we care. The Keyword Boosting feature, which may be a welcome addition for paid search practitioners that are used to running keyword campaigns on Google, can help local business owners reach high-intent audiences more efficiently. For services businesses, this could lead to more leads and/or higher quality leads.

Custom Location Targeting enables businesses to reach audiences outside of their immediate surroundings and now it’s available to all Yelp advertisers.

Yelp’s enhanced budgeting feature uses the additional data points to “make even more informed budget recommendations,” according to the announcement. More relevant recommendations can help improve campaign performance, but advertisers should assess each recommendation before applying it.