Business citations are crucial to maintaining a presence locally with your online customer base and establishing a presence among your competition. Unfortunately, maintaining an updated and consistent presence online can become time-consuming. Additionally, due to the staggering amount of small business openings during the fall of 2021, it’s going to be more difficult to stand out among the crowd.

For instance, ranking higher for the primary keyword that your restaurant specializes in. Like “pizza restaurants near me” which are the most convenient keywords consumers use. However, it is important to note that keywords have different variations and combinations.

Therefore, in this blog, we discuss the importance of establishing business citations in well-known platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc. Moreover, I will detail the importance of creating a well-researched marketing campaign to improve your reach and conversions.

Business Citation Management

As a business owner it’s crucial to maintain your business reputation and social credibility  both online and offline. However, there are so many factors you can’t control like negative reviews. Unfortunately, anyone can leave a negative review and it’s not something that can be removed at the owner's will. Furthermore, we will evaluate some of the common reasons why they occur and are valid. 

This section will focus on finding gaps and improving existing issues with citation listings. Maintaining your citations with accurate information and updated services. Lastly, It’s crucial to check weekly your listing information since it can impact customer expectations and even contribute to a negative review. 

Negative Reviews 

Dealing with negative reviews can be time-consuming, resource wasteful, and even tricky at times. Thus, as a business owner, you need to consistently check recent negative reviews on all your listings. While this sounds good on paper, keeping up with this routine can be tedious and with all your responsibilities as a business owner.

Therefore, you can delegate these tasks to an entry-level employee or manager for each location. Where they can dedicate more time to improve these ratings and maintain customer relations. However, if these resources aren’t available there are various tools online that scrape your reviews or online footprint to find negative elements.

Here are some of the various tools that are used to alert you on negative/positive aspects.
 

Source: 17 Leading Online Reputation Management Tools For 2022 (influencermarketinghub.com)

How To Deal With Bad Reviews 

1. Quick Response 

Don’t hesitate or put off bad reviews, the main reason is that you can still amend things while it’s still fresh. Most reviewers will forget about the issue as time passes so it’s crucial to maintain a short time frame between the date posted of the review. 

2. Take Responsibility

As annoying/wasteful it can be to take criticism for issues outside of your control or unjustified ones. It’s important to listen to all the negative feedback given by a customer after all that is the main objective to maintain an optimal experience. In some cases, negative reviews are even good for your business. These reviews allow you to look at the gaps that are causing issues in your service, food quality, or restaurant environment.

Additionally, it is said that bad reviews usually stem from your foodservice according to a recent study performed by a Stanford professor, Dan Jurafsky. On the other hand, some reviews are unjustified even if you have the most spectacular service so It’s best to reach out to the reviewer and see what’s the real cause. 

3. Explain

This step is fairly simple though essential in this process, explaining what you can do to improve the customer's negative review allows them to feel acknowledged. At the end of the day, a regular customer isn’t just going to leave a negative review to leave one. Most customers are dining out during their discretionary time so they have limited time to intake your full restaurant experience. So it’s better to explain to them immediately why something didn’t meet their expectations and how you can sincerely make it better.

Note: personalize your response as much as possible, it’s efficient to have templates where you can replace elements like name, date, and restaurant name (if multiple locations). 

4. Compensation (if applicable)

 Now this section needs to be taken with a grain of salt, not every review will meet this requirement since this requires a separate budget from your monthly/quarterly one. However, in some cases, it will be effective to compensate customers who provided a valid negative review about your restaurant.

Some examples of compensation 

• Coupons
• Freebies
• Refunds
• Personalized Experiences
• Sweepstake

These are just some examples, afterwards, it’s important to ask for a review edit/revision. This way your review average remains untouched or even increases your rating. On the other hand, It’s essential to always ask customers to review your restaurant. You can even set up a program to incentivize this; for instance, creating a monthly sweepstake where customers can enter by screenshotting their positive reviews and offering alluring prizes.

Digital Marketing For Restaurants 2022

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is key to maintaining a personal approach to your business interaction with your customers. Social Media Marketing allows you to be creative as a restaurant owner to highlight the important and unique aspects of your business. These aspects can be your restaurant theme, food selection, offers, events, anything that sets you aside from your competition. 

Social Media Video Example

The following video is a good example of the type of videos your restaurant can use to advertise through social media. Highlighting the process that goes behind your dishes and the process that makes your restaurant unique. Moreover, it’s important to show your restaurant environment by filming during a normal day to give future customers a visual. Be sure to be creative since the average attention span is very short. 

Pay Per Click 

For this scenario we will focus on Google Ads. In my opinion, Google Ads is the most effective way to advertise digitally for local awareness. Google Ads allow you to advertise your Google My Business listing through Google Maps, YouTube, and Search Engine Results Page. Unfortunately, this does require a little bit of research and work to set up these ads properly.

Here’s an example of they appear on Maps

Both ads show up clearly when searching for “steakhouse.” However, one is more effective than the other since it shows the pictures and average review rating. Which is something we can make sure shows up if you sign-up with our Empowered Marketing Program. 

• Secondary Keywords

The purpose of secondary keywords is to provide additional context to your primary keyword. These keywords are usually longer and are more detailed to provide a clear customer intention. For instance, “Italian restaurant near me”, “Italian restaurant + near me” provide further context that the customer is trying to find new restaurants in their area. Usually, these can be classified by the secondary keyword component in the blue. 

This visual allows us to understand how important it is to support primary keywords to add more context to your content. The most common way to branch them out is by questions like “what”,” where”,” why”, these are the most common combinations. 

50+ High-Quality Business Listing Sites

The following list allows you to find all the diverse business listing sites to post your small business for free. In this list, I’ve included everything from Bing, Google, Yelp, the well-known to alternatives like brownbook. This allows you to reach untapped customer bases and expand the number of websites linking to your key pages. 

However, if listing your business on all these platforms seems like tedious work it is important to read our summary information for a quick solution. 

Business Lisiting Summary

OrderEm is a platform that has allowed local restaurants/small businesses to expand online via uploading their online menus and specials for customers to easily purchase. Now with Empowered Marketing, we can increase the number of online orders and customers visiting your small business by managing your SEO, PPC, Mailing Campaigns, and Social Media. We provide you an initial Free Business Evaluation with all your current Digital Marketing stats and effectiveness. Then we find the gaps missing in your online strategy and offer effective solutions.