5 tips for more and better online reviews

More and more guests first check out the internet, and choose the restaurant based on online reviews and rankings.

The first Google search results gets roughly 60 % of all clicks. The first result page around 99%.

Without top ranking, you don't have much hope for new guests via Google, Facebook or TripAdvisor. With these 5 tips you can substantially increase your restaurant ratings and attract new guest!

Online rankings use two central indicators: First, the average rating of the restaurant, i.e. how good the cuisine and service, ambience or the price-performance ratio are rated. Secondly, the number of ratings. The more and the better the ratings, the higher the ranking of your restaurant. In review management, therefore, you should strive for as many and as good reviews as possible. With these 5 tips you will easily get more and better reviews, have more guests and make more profit.

Focus on the most popular rankings and portals

There are countless portals, focus on the few market leaders: TripAdvisor, Google and Facebook. All other portals such as Quandoo, bookAtable or Opentable are less important and will further lose impact. Google should soon dominate the market. This is where the music plays.

Your guests matter, answer seriously

Respond to online criticism and answer questions, take praise and criticism to heart. Show everyone that you want to offer the best possible service, and how important the guest and his or her well-being is to you. Thereby, you also defuse harsh critique and negative comments, and attract new guests.

Don't get emotional

Joy is beautiful, and of course celebrate good reviews and show how happy your are. But never let insulting comments get you emotionally involved. Most guests don't appreciate noisy troublemaking peers, be it online or in the restaurant. If you respond objectively, it looks professional and you can quickly win guests for your side and your restaurant.

Push reviews: Ask your happy guests

Directly address or write to your satisfied guests. Many will do you the favor and write you a review. You will quickly receive many good ratings. Your restaurant will climb up in the rankings and will appear higher in search results. Many reviews also show the popularity of the restaurant: the place to be, everybody wants to go there!

Make reviews as easy as possible

The easier it is to review for your guests, the more ratings you get. Send your guest an e-mail with direct links to your restaurant profiles on Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor. Your guests then only have to click on the link in the mail to rate your restaurant.

These simple rules help you to significantly improve your online ranking and thus your sales - no marketing budget or endless hours needed -  provided you choose the right tool. 

aleno Reservations Management System automates and pushes reviews. It is only one click to send the guest a nice e-mail after their visit with the request to rate your restaurant on Google, Facebook, or TripAdvisor. Your guest then only has to click on the links to rate your restaurant. After a short time your ratings are skyrocketing and you will win many new customers.

The best choice for managing and answering reviews is re:spondgelligent. The tool reacts automatically to your evaluations, promptly and in the style of your restaurant. This keeps you in control, and you always have the last say, no matter how many portals and reviews there are. Use re:spondelligent to further climb up rankings. 

Read more about aleno review management and re:spondelligent.

Get More and Better Reviews with aleno Push Reviews-Feature

aleno automatically sends e-mails to the guest when reservations are accepted or changed and when the guest status changes. If you check-out the guest after their meal and change the status to "departed", then the guest will automatically receive an e-mail with a thank you note and a request for an online-rating.

In order to get many and good ratings you should consider two things. First, ask satisfied and happy guest only. If things didn't go well in the service, the kitchen or with the guests, then you can stop sending the e-mail at checkout. The guest will then not be asked for a rating.

When you check-out the guest, the following pop-up window will show you the sending status. Just click on Stop to cancel sending the e-mail.

Second, make ratings as simple as possible, e.g. offer one-click ratings. Before activating the push review-feature make sure to adjust the e-mail templates to your style at Settings → Shift → E-mail → Review  and insert the direct links to your restaurant profiles on the three most important portals - Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor (see figures below). If you use more languages, then adapt the e-mail template for each language. Switch between the languages by clicking on the language buttons at the bottom of the template.

Click on the template to start editing.

Insert your URL to the rating portals. You find the links as follows:

Facebook: Go to your Facebook page, click the Ratings link and copy the URL.

TripAdvisor: Go to your TripAdvisor page, click on reviews, then the Write review button appears in the top right corner. Click on it and copy the URL.

Google: Find out your PlaceID following the Google instructions. Insert your PlaceID at the end of the link "https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=".

Now insert the hyperlinks into the e-mail template as follows:

[NameOfPortal] followed by the (link), don't put a space in between, e.g. [NameOfPortal](URL-LINK)

Example:

Now leave the edit mode by clicking on the eye in the upper right corner. Now click and test all links.

Everything works? Great, now go to the settings, select the appropriate shift and check the box "Review e-mails". The automatic review-mails feature is now activated.