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It’s dinner time, consumers in your area are hungry, and after a hard day’s work, they’re too exhausted to cook. They decide they want to treat themselves to dinner out, or perhaps a takeaway courtesy of a great local restaurant. But which one to choose? In the digital age, hungry prospects are unlikely to roam the streets waiting to find an eaterie that takes their fancy. Instead, they’ll look through local directories and restaurant review websites to see which local restaurants are most beloved by their fellow diners.
In no particular order, we take a look at 10 of the best restaurant review sites for restaurateurs to monitor in 2024.
10. Yelp
Yelp arrived in the UK in 2009, having achieved great success stateside where it currently boasts some 33 million unique visitors per month. On this side of the pond, Yelp has become familiar to 33% of social media users, 6% of which use it regularly.
Yelp users can write customer reviews of restaurants, post their own pictures, or simply leave star ratings. Other users can also react to consumer reviews if they are useful or entertaining to read.
9. Yell
The digital successor to the Yellow Pages, Yell is used by 80,0000 businesses across the UK to advertise to consumers. It is the UK’s second most-used consumer directory website, enabling customers to leave star ratings and reviews for restaurants and other businesses. Restaurant owners can also respond to user reviews, thanking them for their feedback and taking remedial action in the event of negative reviews.
8. Foursquare City Guide
Foursquare’s city guide is similar to those offered by the likes of Time Out or Zagat. The key difference, however, is that it features reviews from genuine customers rather than food critics and bloggers. Users can check into restaurants registered with the guide, upload pictures and write their own short reviews. And with an estimated 7.2 million users, it is not a restaurant review site that businesses can afford to ignore.
7. Open Table
While primarily a restaurant booking platform, Open Table allows users to leave short reviews and star ratings for restaurants that they visit. Users can also “like” reviews that they find helpful. Open Table is trusted by around 4 million UK users, making it well worth monitoring not only to see who is booking in at your restaurant but also what they are saying about you when they get home.
6. Deliveroo
Restaurants that want to expand their offering to takeaways will undoubtedly want to make integration with delivery platforms part of their operations management. Delivery platforms can also be a great source of customer feedback, with customers able to leave star ratings and reviews for the food that they receive. With over 7 million users per month, Deliveroo is a market leader and well worth monitoring for restaurateurs.
5. Just Eat
Just Eat is another takeaway and delivery platform, with around 61 million users across the UK and Western Europe. As well as being a potential revenue stream, it is a potentially useful source of customer feedback as users can leave both star ratings and reviews for the restaurants whose food they enjoy.
##4. Uber Eats
The third takeaway and delivery platform on our list, Uber Eats is the second-most downloaded food-related app in the UK, with over 3.5 million downloads in 2022 (the most recent year for which figures are available).
Uber Eats users can review and rate restaurants after ordering food for takeaway or delivery, making it one to watch for restaurant owners.
3. Trip Advisor
The world’s largest travel platform, Trip Advisor helps over 450 million global travellers to make purchasing decisions every month. While we may associate it primarily with hotel and BnB bookings, many also use it to decide which restaurants, bars and cafes to visit on their trip to your city or town. Users can leave reviews and star ratings as well as rating one another’s reviews.
2. Facebook
Facebook remains the world’s largest social media platform, even if it grabs fewer headlines these days than the likes of X or TikTok. As well as being part of your social marketing and customer engagement strategy it also functions fairly well as a restaurant review site with customers writing reviews with which you as the business owner can engage.
1. Google Business
With over 8.5 billion global searches carried out every day, Google is the world’s favourite search engine. When a search engine has successfully made its name into a verb, it’s safe to say that it is a market leader. As such, businesses of all kinds have a Google Business account. This not only helps customers to find and contact you, it also enables users to leave star ratings and reviews that you can monitor and respond to.
Ensure that your restaurant has a favourable presence on these restaurant review sites, and there’s an excellent chance that you could find these hungry diners on your restaurant’s doorstep. Moreover, these sites are a goldmine of invaluable customer feedback. Their praise can show you everything that you’re doing right, while criticisms can provide an opportunity to take action and repair a potentially fractured customer relationship.
