7 Strategies to Get Your First One Hundred 5-Star Reviews
Increasing average restaurant review ratings can be daunting for business owners, yet they are key to boosting your reputation and growing your business. Here are a few tactics to get your first hundred 5-star reviews online.
Why you need more 5-star reviews
A positive reputation on review sites is key to attracting potential customers and distinguishing you from your competitors.
The ultimate tool to know your Google reviews ranking: sunday’s top 150
See how you’re doing compared to your competitors on Google and how many stars you need to stay top-of-the-game. Pro tip: over half of Atlanta’s top 15 restaurants use sunday to boost their Google reviews!
Now, let’s move on to the strategies you can implement today to grow your online reputation.
1. Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences
Put yourself in your diner’s shoes: what would make you write a positive review? Let’s be honest, it takes time and energy to write a review and very few people do take this step. Even after a good experience. So you need to provide an exceptional customer experience through impeccable, quick, and personalized service. Encourage your staff to go the extra mile.
2. Optimize Your Online Presence
Start optimizing your online presence by updating your Google My Business, which is the profile that will appear first when people google your restaurant or look for a place to eat in your area. A My Business page that you haven’t created yourself might already exist for your restaurant. Don’t panic: you can request to become the owner of that page or create a new one and merge the two. Learn more about that and other ways to optimize your Google My Business Profile here.
Complete your Google My Business attributes such as service options and categories such as “Italian Restaurant” or “Bar.” This information will help the algorithm understand your restaurant better and appear in recommended suggestions in relevant user searches. Having this information available and up to date greatly impacts your Google ranking.
Make sure your profiles are consistent on all the platforms you’re on. Especially important are holidays and opening hours (your website, Yelp, TripAdvisor, social media). This will also play a role in search engine algorithms as accurate and consistent information will push you up the search results. Update the information everywhere, especially your opening hours. There’s nothing worse than arriving at a closed restaurant with a hungry stomach!
Upload high-quality pictures to your online profiles and website. Diners can add their own pictures on most review sites such as Google. This might crowd your profile with low-quality images that may not represent your business well.
Reply to reviews. As you scroll through your business profiles online, you may realize there are some reviews you still need to respond to: it’s never too late to amend that. Replying is crucial as it shows your customers that you care about their feedback and it encourages new ones to write reviews.
Now that you have worked on your online presence, continue optimizing your profile by attracting more positive customer feedback. On to the next step.
3. Proactively Ask for Customer Reviews
We know it’s hard to ask for what you need. And you don’t want to bother your customers. However, if you don’t ask for the reviews you want, chances are your diners won’t even think about giving you feedback.
Your staff is the key contact person with your customers. Make sure to train your client-facing employees on how to solicit reviews with clear guidelines. Also, motivate your staff to ask for reviews. Give rewards to the employees who generate the most online reviews.
Your first reviews can come from trusted friends and loyal customers. Your regulars are more likely to leave you a positive review. Ask them via email or SMS if you have that info, or when they visit —it’s certainly more efficient than asking someone coming for the first time.
Reviews are a long-run game and you need a constant flow of them to build trust among potential new diners, so you should ask for reviews regularly.
4. Incentivize your Customers to Leave a Review
On top of having your staff proactively ask for reviews, nudge your diners to leave online feedback through physical and digital review cards.
Physical review cards can be QR codes you place on each table for diners to leave a review by just scanning the code. You can also use an NFC. It’s possible to link the QR code directly to your Google My Business review form through the “share review form” link you can find in the “get more reviews” section of your dashboard menu.
You can also save costs and time by implementing digital review cards. For example, make sure each of your communications includes an incentive to leave a review via your review link, either online through emails or your social media and on-side with visual cues. You can set up an automatic email to be sent to diners after each time they visit your restaurant.
Yet the easiest way to collect reviews is to integrate a Google review feature to your Point-of-Sale (POS) system. That’s how we help restaurants boost their 5-star Google reviews in months. Restaurants like Atlanta-based Tex-Mex Lin Tizzy have about 90% of their reviews come from sunday with high ratings.
5. Guide Diners on How to Give Feedback
With endless solicitations and a limited amount of time, it can be tedious for your diners to leave a review. So help them! Make it easy for them to write a review by explaining how to either in person or through written content in an email or on a physical or digital review card. Why not innovate and create a video about how to write a review? This might inspire your followers on social media to finally take the jump and write an online review for your restaurant. Plus it’s a good place to showcase your brand identity and philosophy.
You can also help your diners with writing their reviews through examples or guiding questions. Take your best testimonials so far, or write what you wish someone said about your restaurant, and showcase it as an example for your customers to leave a review. You can also propose a few questions or items you want your diners to anwser in their review. Guiding examples and leading questions are a great way for you to get the reviews you need.
6. Encourage Feedback and Loyalty through Customer Engagement
Similarly to rewarding your staff who obtained the most reviews, you can give something in return to people who reviewed you. For example, why not offer a free dessert or coffee to your diner who left you a review, on the spot or next time? You can also encourage feedback through a contest in which one of the past month’s or week’s reviews will be selected for a prize. The competition could also be about who wrote the most creative or surprising review.
Don’t hesitate also to showcase customer reviews. And let them know about it! It’s a good opportunity to engage with your diners. You can print physical copies of your favorite testimonials to display inside your restaurant or contact your reviewers directly to thank them. They’ll appreciate you taking the time and it might encourage them to leave another one. Loyalty programs also encourage multiple feedback and engage better with your frequent customers.
While you need to constantly ask for reviews, you can also boost reviews at a particular time such as a special event, e.g. with free food or menu tasting. There’s nothing like a memorable in-person experience to boost your online reputation. Special events are a great way to attract more positive reviews: with this end goal in mind, you and your staff can be all hands on deck and ensure participants cannot leave you less than 5-stars.
7. Engage Responsively with Reviews
We know you have a lot on your plate as a restaurant owner or employee, but you need to reply to all your reviews to optimize your online presence. And your responses need to be professional and quick. We suggest you book a time in your schedule just for that. At sunday we offer AI-powered solutions to reply to your reviews efficiently and save many hours of your time. Find more about how to reply to online reviews here.
FAQ
I have bad reviews on Google and I want to start again with a clean slate. Can I just create a new business profile to erase negative reviews?
Interestingly, yes! Create a new business profile and claim the previous one as your own within the 7-day delay.
Are online reviews more important than word of mouth for restaurants?
In a sense, online reviews can be considered the new digital word of mouth. Yet in traditional word of mouth, we hear from people we know, not unknown people on the internet, which is more powerful. Customers are 92% likely to trust people they know versus 70% for online reviews. Numbers are still high, but nothing beats a good old friend’s recommendation when it comes to dining.
It all depends on your competitors in your local area. You might be the top-ranked restaurant in your field (e.g. Chinese cuisine) in your location (e.g. West Side, Chicago) with a 3.7-star rating, but the same rating in the same category in another city might make you the lowest-ranked. It’s important to understand your local context to establish a sound goal. We designed a tool just for that: check out your Google review ranking in your area.
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