Easy Tool to Improve Restaurant Star Ratings on Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor
Last Updated on October 17, 2024
Our Ratings tool helps improve your star ratings on Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Facebook. It's easy to implement and valuable for all 88 Restaurants clients that use our reservation tools. Below we outline how it works, why its extra useful for restaurants that are on OpenTable, and easy steps to find your ratings pages on the review sites above.
The easiest way to learn about our Ratings Booster tool is to watch the video below.
How The Restaurant Ratings Booster Tool Works The idea behind the Restaurant Ratings Booster is simple and smart. Since most restaurants have ratings that are in the 4 to 5 star range, any rating less than 5 stars will drag your average lower. Thus you really only want to encourage customers that had a 5 star experience to rate you on popular ratings sites. To achieve that goal, we send every customer that books a reservation using the 88 Restaurants widget on your website a text message the day after completing their reservation asking them to rate their dining experience with 1 to 5 stars. If they rate it 5 stars, we then encourage them to rate you on Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and/or Facebook with a quick link directly to each your restaurant's review page on those sites. If they give you 1 to 4 stars, we encourage them to let you know how you can improve. Giving a customer an opportunity to voice a concern helps keep them from leaving weak ratings. You can see the flow in the mobile screen captures below. You can monitor your star ratings, customer feedback, and see how many customers clicked which links by visiting Reporting > Ratings while logged into your 88 Restaurants account.
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How it Benefits Restaurants that Use OpenTable OpenTable grew in popularity by encouraging their users to rate your restaurant on their website. If you only use their widget on your website, you won't have any tools to improve ratings on Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Facebook. A lot of restaurants use the 88 Restaurants widget on their website to get the best of both worlds. It can also save you a fortune by eliminating reservation cover fees and encouraging customers to come back more often.
How to Find your Rating Pages
Yelp and Trip Advisor: For these two sites you simply find your profile on those sites and then click on the write review button. Then cut and paste the resulting URL into the proper field on 88 Restaurants in Tools > Ratings. Make sure it’s the one where customers can select an actual star rating and write a description.
Google: Google is by far the most important. They use a Google Places ID code attached to a URL to construct your ratings page. To build the link. you must first search for your business here. When you see your business select it and you will see a Place ID code. Cut and paste that code into the link below replacing the portion after the = sign with the places ID for your business. Then cut and paste that entire link into the field for Google on Reservation Genie. https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJwfVQzl7KRIYRu14zSaDaLsk|
Facebook: The guys at Meta are always redesigning their review concept and do it differently than the rating sites above using a "recommend format" that only allows customers to give it a thumbs up or down. To find your Facebook link, visit your profile and click on Reviews in the left hand column. It will look like this
When you’re done, hit save and scroll down and you’ll see links to test the implementation for all the review sites. Click on those to make sure they open the rating/review page directly.
Monitoring Negative Experiences to Help Make Adjustments We added a report at Reporting > Ratings that shows toll results. It highlighs which sites they clicked, organizes and feedback from 1-4 star reviews, and lets you filter results over the last year to help visualize results.
As always, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have questions or need help implementing our Restaurant Ratings Booster.
