How to get more reviews for a restaurant

In this post, we'll cover a few key strategies to gather more reviews for restaurant.

Before we dive into review collection strategies, I wrote a little blurb to clarify the whole thing, and hopefully bring a little bit of a light to an increasingly obscure topic.

How do reviews work for restaurants, and do you need them?

Let's start with facts.

1. Google Maps is used by over 1 billion people every month (source)
2. Google Maps is the world's #3 most popular Google app, with 11 million users downloading it. (source)
3. The average time spent per user on Google Maps is 152 minutes per month​​. (source)

And they're not just scrolling endlessly on Google Maps are they?

They're searching.

In comparison, Yelp is estimated to drive around 145M visitors per month (source) and Tripadvisor anywhere between 130 and 140 million (source)

Long story short, focus on Google.

The rest is nice to have.

How can you influence rankings on Google Maps?

There are two ways to get more foot traffic from Google Maps

1. Rank higher on some keywords
2. Rank on new keywords

Review velocity – i.e. the number of new reviews you collect every month – is the easiest and most impactful driver to boost your rankings on your current set of keywords.

This means two things:

1. Getting a bunch of 5-star reviews over the next 2 weeks and then stopping entirely will not move the needle.
2. Getting a steady flow of 5 star reviews over the next 2 years is the easiest way for you to get more customers through your doors.

But here's where it gets interesting. Not all reviews are made alike.

The keywords mentioned in your customers' reviews matter. And if enough customers mention their favourite dish, or your signature dish, odds are you'll rank when people search for that dish.

Not only that, but they'll help increase CTR (Click Through Rate).

That's the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.

Which is one of the best proxies Google has to evaluate a result's relevance.

So not only do customer reviews mentioning specific words help you rank on those keywords, the review text itself has a massive impact on how high you'll rank in that search.

TL;DR

• Google is around 6 times bigger than the next platforms (Yelp & Tripadvisor) in terms of traffic. So you should probably spend at least 6x more time and energy on Google as you do on the other platforms.
• Getting a steady stream of positive reviews about your business will help your business rank higher across all keywords on Google Maps. Which will directly drive more customers through your doors.
• Getting high quality reviews, with actually valuable content mentioning your dishes, staff, ambience, etc are what will help your restaurant rank – and will help determine how high – on more keywords, which will directly drive more customers through your doors.

How to get more google reviews for your restaurant

#1 Start by measuring how you're doing

I mentioned that a steady stream of 5 star reviews is key to driving more customers through Google.

Which means consistency is the number one thing that will move the needle.

And we're all human.

We can't possibly be consistent about anything if we don't have a baseline, and a target to aim for.

So start by the beginning.

You don't need anything fancy here, but you do need accurate values.

Create a spreadsheet, iPhone note, write it down on a white board at home – whatever works for you – and track the following numbers

• Number of new reviews (weekly)
• Average rating of those new reviews (weekly)
• Google rating (which is nothing more than the overall average of all your reviews' ratings up to that date).

It's fairly easy to do this manually. But you might struggle a little with dates (they're relative on Google), and with tracking google ratings.

To make your life easier, you can use our free google review calculator. It's totally free to use, and there's no email capture or anything.

Here's what the chart for a high-ranking restaurant in a competitive area looks like by the way

With our calculator, you can also play around with your target rating, # of new reviews per month, and new review average rating to see how they might impact your overall google rating.

If you want to automate all this tracking and measuring and stuff, you can do so with Reviewflowz, from as little as $36 / month for a single restaurant.

For more information about this, check out our pricing page.

Although I'll say this once more, if you're not measuring your performance, you will never be consistent enough to actually improve.

#2 Make it ridiculously easy to review your restaurant

This part is easy.

Go online, get a review link for all restaurants, and turn it into a QR code.

Put that QR code everywhere it's relevant. You can print it on tables. Use NFC tabs if you really want to get super fancy (it's overkill though)).

A few easy "hacks" are printing the QR code on your receipts, and on your menus.

But feel free to get creative!

How about bathroom doors ? Smoking areas (in Europe) ?

We're in 2025. If people are on their own, there's a solid chance they'll look for something to keep their ADHD brains busy.

Help them help you.

Whatever you do, don't overcomplicate things.

Don't try to get a review 3 days later over some complex whatsapp / email automation sequence.

This does not work.

Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

If you're not sure where to get a link and QR code, or if you're not happy with Google's links & QR codes because they don't work on most iPhones (source), you can use our google review link generator.

It's also entirely free, and doesn't require any sort of contact information.

If you need shortened links, with tracking links, or built-in balancing, check out our subscription plans. Advanced review collection tools start at $20 / restaurant / month at reviewflowz.

Will you get the occasional unhappy person's rant on Google?

Yes.

Does it matter?

No.

You have over 150 positive reviews coming in every month now, remember?

#3 Incentivize your staff

Ok, now we're getting into the nitty gritty of how to actually get significantly more reviews than the competition.

The first thing you can try is to incentivize your staff.

Start by figuring out how much a review is worth to you.

Start small – say $5 or $10 and increase gradually when you start seeing the ROI.

Tell your service staff that you'll pay them $XX for each positive review that mentions them by name.

If a review mentions multiple people, you'll split the incentive among them.

This works wonders for a few reasons

1. The human touch is incredibly effective. If your staff are asking around for reviews, and letting customers know to mention them by name, customers feel like they're doing them a solid by reviewing your restaurant. Collection rates typically soar to 40 - 50% when reviews are asked for personally (from 5 - 10% otherwise)
2. It also gives you a lot more control over what sort of reviews you're getting. For example, if you want reviews to mention your dishes, you can tell that to your staff, and they'll tell customers in a non-invasive, natural way. "How was the Seabass? Oh, would you be willing to share that feedback on Google? It's a new dish / our signature dish and we're trying to get the word out". Context is everything

Typically, CTRs are exponential on search result pages, with the first result taking around 30 - 35% of the clicks, the second 15 - 20%, and the third around 5%. The rest get breadcrumbs.

You can look this up on local seo forums and tools

If you're concerned about how to calculate the incentives when the end of the month comes, don't be.

You can export your google reviews for $0.10 per review on our google review exports tool and calculate that easily with excel – for example every month or every quarter.

Even better, you can build a custom leaderboard for everyone to see on the team. Here's a complete guide on how to do that.

If you're going to spend $5 or $10 per review, you can probably spare $36 / month to get a few extra reviews right?

#4 Incentivize your customers

That's the last resort sort of strategy.

If you're really having a hard time collecting google reviews – think sex shop or haemorrhoid surgeon hard – it might be worth incentivizing your customers directly to review you online.

Jokes aside, this can actually be done in quite tasteful ways.

For example, you could email your customer database with a limited offer, asking for a review to be able to redeem it.

Something like "Show us your google review, get free desert next time you come around."

Now the issue here is you'll ideally want to email only customers that have not reviewed you yet.

This is where things get a little more complex, with customer identification technology and such – We also support that, but there's no free option, except sifting manually through all of your google reviews looking for them in your customer database.

Generally speaking, I'd recommend looking into those options only if you're in dire need of a review rating boost – for example if your average is sitting at 3.2 and you don't want to send clients to review you and see that rating – or if you're fighting a review bomb campaign or that sort of thing.

Other than that, you should be more than covered with consistent efforts, motivated staff, and easy and obvious ways to review your restaurant!

Updated on: 08/08/2025