Have you noticed the trend that businesses are more and more eager to find themselves on Yelp? This makes perfect sense for businesses that sell a consumer product, like stores, or that sell food, like restaurants. However, now that people are relying more and more on Yelp to decide whether they should patronize a business, companies in increasingly more abstract fields are being found with reviews on there, too. This may not seem like a perfect match at first. Still, when you do find a consulting business like mandrien consulting at yelp, what should it mean to your shopping process?

Many of you probably heard of Yelp in the first place while looking for a review of a local store, a restaurant, or perhaps a service that sells easily measurable services, like car repair or plumbing. Those sorts of places are a great fit for Yelp, because it’s easy to trust a stranger’s review in those cases. Food is either edible or it’s not, and a fixed car or a pipe that doesn’t leak anymore are easy to agree on, as well. Also, it goes without saying that everyone needs food, or for whatever car they own to work, or for their pipes not to leak.

When a business provides a service whose desirability is harder to measure, though, Yelp becomes a tougher row to hoe as far as using it to research that company. After all, no one besides you, and perhaps the potential consultant, can decide for you whether you actually need consulting services. Your situation is likely to be very individual, which means your mileage may vary a lot from that of a Yelp reviewer of the same business who had very different circumstances.

This may be why we don’t often see professional-services firms reviewed on Yelp. That, and the fact that the issues that were worked on may be too sensitive from a business point of view for a satisfied customer to Yelp about! So if you find good news about such companies on the site, be pleased that you have—but when you’re seriously in the market for consulting services, make a point of contacting the company directly too, to get a more personalized feel of what they can offer you. This is one area in which you can’t shop only through social-media reviews!