The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Reviews: How to Maximize Your Rankings

Restaurants need more than just great food these days - they need visibility! Learn how to optimize your presence on top restaurant review sites like Google My Business & Yelp.

The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Reviews: How to Maximize Your Rankings

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.

Facebook

is also a great website for a social media marketing strategy, as well as social ads. Social media statistics from restaurants show that Facebook is also popular with customers when choosing a place to eat, with 72% using the platform to make gastronomic decisions.

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!

Conclusion

Some people will tell you that Yelp is the most important review site for restaurants; others will tell you that it is Tripadvisor; but we think Google is the most important website for restaurants. With 3.5 billion searches performed per day, listing your restaurant on Google My Business opens it up to a huge potential audience. No matter which sites you choose to focus on for your restaurant business, it's important to make sure you're optimizing your presence on them in order to maximize your rankings and reach as many potential customers as possible.

Kayla Zimmerly
Kayla Zimmerly

Award-winning tea scholar. Subtly charming zombie expert. Typical travel fan. Incurable foodaholic. Devoted tv nerd.