In this 5-minute read:
- Claim your restaurant’s Yelp business profile
- Keep your profile up to date with tons of photos
- Get more reviews and respond to them
- Offer deals and discounts
- Advertise on Yelp
- Promote your Yelp listing in other places
Restaurants are the most reviewed businesses on Yelp. It’s a popular platform for customers to leave helpful information about their favorite (or least favorite) restaurants, and many people use those reviews to make a decision about your restaurant before they ever step foot into it.
Attract more customers and keep them loyal with reputation management software. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
So, how can you promote your restaurant on Yelp to make sure it is prominent enough to get found? We have a few tricks up our sleeve to help you out.
Claim your Yelp business page
The first thing you’ll need to do is claim the Yelp business page for your restaurant. Sometimes there may already be one in existence that was automatically generated by Yelp or created by its users. Check to see if you have a Yelp listing out there by searching for your restaurant on Yelp.
If you don’t already have a listing, it’s time to create one.
Check out how to claim your Yelp business listing to get started.
Keep your profile up to date
Once you have your Yelp listing created and claimed, you need to keep all of your restaurant’s information updated. Yelp wants to provide value to its users, so having accurate information is an important step in showing up well on their platform.
Here are some of the top things you’ll want to include:
- Restaurant name
- Address
- Phone number
- Regular open hours (and holiday hours if these change)
- Email address
- Website
- Menu and prices (regularly update this if it changes often)
- Photos
- Payments accepted
- Wi-fi availability
- Parking availability
Provide as much information as you can on your restaurant’s Yelp listing. This will help customers in their search, and we’re hoping it will convince them to pick you!
Post tons of photos
We mentioned photos in our list above, but we want to dive a little deeper. Visuals, especially of delicious-looking food, can make or break someone’s decision to visit your restaurant.
Get a professional photographer to come in and take pictures of popular menu items to post on your Yelp business page. If you have a good camera or can take great pictures with your phone, you can do that too.
Post tons of pictures of your restaurant and your food so people get excited about the experience that they will receive with you.
Get and respond to Yelp reviews
Having a lot of good Yelp reviews coming in on a regular basis is great for helping your restaurant show up better on Yelp, not to mention that it will help immensely with customer conversions too.
The freshness of your reviews matters. If your last review is from six months ago, that says something to customers. They start to wonder if your restaurant still good and if they should consider someplace else with more recent reviews.
Womply’s data shows that businesses with fresh reviews earn 52% more than average. That’s because people want to go to restaurants that have good, recent reviews.
How can you get more reviews for your restaurant on Yelp?
Most review platforms have policies about how you are allowed to get reviews from customers, but Yelp, in particular, is a little more strict about this process. They discourage you from asking customers to leave reviews because they want reviews to come in naturally and unsolicited. Read their policies about this when you set up your account.
The best way to encourage customers to leave Yelp reviews for your restaurant is to place official “rate us on Yelp” signs on your windows, menus, and at the cash register. That will remind them to leave a review when they are enjoying their meal.
Responding to reviews
When you do start getting reviews, it’s important to respond to them as well. Customers want to see engagement from the owners when they leave a review or if anyone has left a negative review.
Respond to all positive reviews with a brief thank you, and make sure you respond to all negative reviews with a professional and friendly response. Try to resolve the issue is possible, and you might be able to get that customer to amend their review.
Here are some tips to help you further: How to respond to negative reviews
Offer sweet deals for your restaurant
Everyone loves to get a good deal. Appeal to this by offering discounts or deals for your restaurant on your Yelp listing. When you have a new promotion going on, post about it on Yelp.
You can also try Yelp Deals, which lets you create discounts and gift certificates on Yelp for your restaurant. Customers purchase these prepaid vouchers from Yelp, and then Yelp pays your part to you each month.
Advertise your restaurant on Yelp
Yelp has some great capabilities when it comes to small business advertising. Advertise your restaurant on Yelp to get it in front of more potential customers.
Some of the great benefits of Yelp’s advertising platform include the following:
- Target local customers
You can target customers who are already searching for restaurants similar to yours in your town.
- Premium placements
When you pay to advertise your restaurant on Yelp, they will place your listing at the top of relevant search results as well as on competitor’s pages.
- Several platforms
People most frequently use mobile devices for their Yelp searches, so Yelp makes sure to place your ad across several platforms to capture as many opportunities as possible: desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and mobile apps.
Go deeper: learn more about Yelp advertising.
Promote your Yelp listing off of Yelp
Not everyone does their research for a new restaurant on Yelp. Some go to Google or other search engines and find your website or Facebook page. Let people know that you are on Yelp with some of these methods:
- Place an official Yelp badge on your restaurant’s website and link it to your Yelp profile.
- Add “rate us on Yelp” signage and stickers throughout your restaurant.
- Invite customers to “check-in” to Yelp on the mobile app when they arrive.
Yelp is a great resource for your restaurant and will provide ample opportunity to get new customers. Take advantage of that. And if you’re concerned about missing reviews and want help managing them, Womply offers reputation management solutions to help you succeed. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!