Restaurants use Yelp everyday to help improve and grow their business. Is your restaurant one of them?
Yelp is one of the most used resources for people to find and research local restaurants. Whether they are looking for new restaurants, browsing for reviews or wanting to leave a comment these people can be extremely important to the success of your restaurant.
Why Should Restaurants Use Yelp?
Yelp has over 67 million local reviews which makes it the leading local review site on the web. While Yelp is sometimes an afterthought for restaurant owners these days with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to worry about, it’s clear to see that it’s still a huge resource that your customers are using each and every day.
How to choose a good restaurant is a difficult decision for a lot of people if they haven’t been there before. This is why so many people are looking up reviews of local restaurants. You can’t afford to ignore the largest review site if you are serious about wanting to grow and improve your restaurant.
1. Build a Great Profile
If you haven’t already setup your restaurant on Yelp, first check to see if it is already listed. Do a quick search for your restaurant’s name and see if it shows up. If it’s listed, you can claim the listing by clicking the “Work here? Claim this business” link.
Make sure your information is correct and up-to-date on your listing. The following checklist will help you with creating the best Yelp page that you can.
- Add your restaurants name and make sure you’re in the right category.
- Include details about your restaurant such as your phone number, address and website.
- Create a photo gallery with high quality pictures of your food and restaurant atmosphere.
- Connect your profile to OpenTable to accept reservations right from Yelp.
Check out your competitors profiles on Yelp and see which one’s have high reviews to get some ideas of how you can improve your own profile.
2. Respond to Reviews
Be sure to respond to both the positive and negative reviews.
Remind your self that it doesn’t do yourself any good by commenting on a negative review in a negative way. Be kind and respectful to everyone and thank them for their feedback, explain your situation and offer a way to make it up to them or show how you will improve the issue for future visits.
Respond to positive reviews as well. Thank them for coming to your restaurant and how great it feels that they have enjoyed their experience.
By responding to every review, positive and negative, shows customers that you genuinely care about their experience at your restaurant and that you will go above and beyond to make sure that they have a great time.
3. Use Your Reviews In Other Places
Why not take advantage of your positive reviews and get them more exposure to potential customers? Take your best reviews and put them on your website so that more people can see them and to build trust with the people viewing your website.
Leverage social media as well and re-post reviews on Facebook and Twitter.
4. Use Yelp Metrics
Once you’ve built your Yelp page and it’s received some exposure you can now get some valuable information about your profile using Yelp Metrics. You can view such information as:
- Traffic on your page
- Views from mobile devices
- Track how your business has performed over specific time periods
- Yelp organic search results
- Total number of “User Actions” which include:
- Number of mobile check-ins
- Calls to your business
- Photos uploaded to your profile
- Clicks to your website
- Requests for directions to your restaurant
- And more
5. Advertise On Yelp
There are two ways that you can advertise on Yelp if you choose to go beyond using their free service.
You can advertise your restaurant on Yelp by create targeted local ads that display to customers nearby who are already looking for a restaurant. Yelp states that 82% of users are intending to make a purchase when they visit Yelp which makes it more likely your ad will convert into a customer.
You could also run a Yelp Deal which are prepaid vouchers that you can offer your customers to use as a discount at your restaurant. This gives customers and incentive when browsing restaurants to choose yours instead of your competitions.
