Restaurants have long been a popular destination for diners looking for a great meal and a memorable experience. But in today's digital age, it's not enough to just have a great restaurant. You need to make sure your restaurant is listed on the right review sites and that you're optimizing your presence on those sites to maximize your rankings. Certain review sites such as Google and Yelp tend to receive more traffic than other less popular restaurant review websites.
It's important to make sure your restaurant is listed on these sites, as well as other lesser-known ones, in order to maximize your visibility and reach the widest possible audience. Here's a guide to the most important restaurant review sites and how to optimize your presence on them.
Google My Business
is easily the most relevant and highest-traffic review site you need to worry about. Listing on Google My Business is free, so all restaurants should make sure they're listed here. This allows you to appear in Google Maps restaurant searches and makes it easier for customers to find you.Yelp
is one of the best-known review sites online and dominates search rankings.A Harvard Business School study found that even a one-star increase in Yelp ratings could increase revenues by 5-9%, especially for independent restaurants rather than chains. Founded in October 2004 in San Francisco, California, Yelp is the go-to site for diners looking to discover great places to eat. The site has a wide range of business categories, but food, restaurants, nightlife and bars are the sectors in which Yelp has made its name.
Advertising your restaurant through Facebook can help you reach a huge, targeted audience with good practices.
Zagat
is one of the oldest and best-known restaurant rating and review websites. The site is best known for its 30-point rating scale. This scale covers various aspects of the dining experience, including food, decor, service and cost.Zomato
, formerly known as Urbanspoon, is another popular and frequently visited restaurant review site. Customers can also make reservations through Zomato once they have found a restaurant.Foursquare
is a business review site and app that lists several businesses, including restaurants.The Infatuation
is owned by Zagat, so they show similar ratings and create restaurant guides.Tripadvisor
, the world's largest travel site, has left an indelible mark on the hotel and hospitality industry.But it's also having an impact on restaurants. TripAdvisor may focus on travel-based experiences, but today it's known as a restaurant review site. You may notice that popular restaurants often display TripAdvisor badges and stickers on their premises to prove their approval. TripAdvisor has an average of 463 million monthly visitors and some of the keywords that attract the most traffic to the site are “restaurants near me” and “food near me”, making it an essential review site to monitor and optimize.
Grubhub
, Chicago-based Grubhub is an online food ordering and delivery marketplace that connects diners to takeout restaurants.Formerly owned by Yelp, Eat24 was a leading food delivery and collection service with a network of more than 30,000 restaurants in more than 1,500 cities.
Seamless
is an online food ordering service that allows users to order food delivery and takeout from restaurants through its website or mobile application suite. The company is also owned by Grubhub, which has more than 115,000 businesses in 2,200 US cities.OpenTable
allows customers who use its online restaurant reservation system to share their dining experience, so this is a place you should monitor. Approximately 24 hours after diners eat at your restaurant, they receive an email from OpenTable inviting them to give.Gayot
uses a 20-point scale and his reviews include not only the food, but also the decor, the service, the atmosphere and the wine. With a multitude of high-profile advertisers, Gayot claims to have more than 100 million impressions on its website each year.DoorDash
.About 28% of DoorDash's 18 million users consider themselves monthly users. Upon receipt of your shipment, customers are asked to give it a 5-star rating in the app. You can also leave a comment if you wish.
Optimizing Your Presence on Restaurant Review Sites
Now that you know which sites are important for your restaurant business, let's look at how you can optimize your presence on them:- Make sure all your company details and contact information are up to date on all sites.
- Take advantage of Yelp's “ask the community” feature - this is a great way to use UGC (user generated content) to answer common customer questions and create social proof at the same time.
- Locations that change their Google My Business profile rating from 3.5 to 3.7 stars see 120% conversion growth - so make sure you're monitoring your ratings closely!
