Andrew McCauley explains why restaurants need citations across directory sites like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Top-ranked restaurants average 127 citations versus 86 for typical local businesses. Use the N-A-P-W checklist (Name, Address, Phone, Website) to keep your information consistent everywhere.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Reservations. This is Andrew McCauley with Whiteboard Wednesday. I've got Jeff behind the camera. Help me out today, but welcome. Thanks for joining us. Today we are going to talk about restaurant citations. Whoa, what's a citation? Citations and reviews. You know, the thing, one of those. One of those things we love to hate, where people leave reviews. Not only reviews, but also where else do people find you on the web, of course. You've got your beautifully lovely optimized website, but that is not the only place people find you. They will find you on all sorts of websites that you may have never heard of before. How do you get your information into those, into those sites? How do you make sure that your information is getting found on Google and it's the right information, not the wrong information? Well, I'm here to tell you about citations and why it's important to make sure that you've got all of the data correct across the board. In fact, there was just a recent report not long ago that said that the local businesses that have the number one spot. So all local businesses across the board, the number one spot on Google is contained with businesses that have about 86, on average. 86 citations. 86 places on the web that they are mentioned that. That's the number one local spot, right? Well, restaurants have an average of 127 citations on the number one spot, which means it's a lot harder for you guys to work, work at to make sure that you're getting in the number one spot. Now, I want you to think about this. When people go to Google and they do a search for restaurants near me, your website's not coming up, okay? Google is going to show their stuff. They're going to show their local places, they're going to show other people websites that have a lot more traffic than you. TripAdvisor, Yelp, all of those ones, they are called citation sites. And it's very, very, very hard to beat those sites because of the sheer volume of traffic they've got. So do you throw your hands up in the air and say, this is all too hard? No, you don't. You actually get to work and make sure that the information on those sites is up to date. So here's what you need to think about. I'm going to show you three, four, make it four letters.
N, A P, W. N, A P, W. This is the cornerstone of making sure that your citations are very, very good. First one, of course, is your name. Now you're going to say, well, my name is not that hard to get wrong or right? Here's the truth, is that it is quite hard to get right. You've got to make sure that it's consistent. That's the challenge. Your name is consistently spelled or pronounced or shown across every single citation you can possibly manage. Okay? The name has got to be exactly the same. The address. Let me spell this right. The address has to be the same. Now what am I talking about? Let's say that you're in a suite or a lot or.
A different part of a building. For instance, you might say suite. You might spell the word S U, I, T, E. Or you might say ste.
However you spell that has to be consistent. All right? You've got to make sure the road name is exactly. Are you spelling the road name with an rd or an R, O, A D. Okay, it sounds crazy, but you've got to make sure that it's consistent across the board. So your address has to be consistent. Your phone number has to be consistent. Now you're going to probably say, well, how do I change my phone number? You don't change your phone number, but the way you write it may be different. Do you do a plus one at the beginning of your phone number across the board or do you just have it as your local area code first? Do you have a local area code with parentheses or do you have no parentheses? Do you have spaces and dashes in there? It sounds crazy, but that all affects the, the way these listings appear. Okay. And of course, the final thing is your website. Do you have the same web address on all of your listings? Right. So you got. There's the. There's the three things. Napw, name, address, phone number, and website. Now for bonus points, and I highly recommend, this is the fact that you will have the ability to add other things like.
Photos onto these sites. So Google my business lets you upload photos. Okay. Videos. You can upload videos onto these sites. Of course, a lot of these sites have reviews. What sort of stars do you want? You want five stars? Of course. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that another day. But reviews need to be on your, on your citations. You gotta have good reviews, good reviews, the cornerstone for a lot of businesses. What else have we got? Menus. Samples of your menus. Okay. Of your menu. If you've got a great menu, you want to make sure you're putting it out there so that all of these sites can see a sample of it. You may have your menu on a open table or one of those places. This is super important as well. There was one other thing I was thinking of, and that was your hours operation.
Hours of operation. Are they consistent? But make sure they're on your citations as well. Now, there are a couple of tools out there that let you do this in bulk. Sometimes they cost a little bit of money. Other times they're not so bad. Moz Local. Moz Moz Local is a great tool that will go out and find all your listings for a monthly fee or a yearly fee. It's about a hundred bucks. And they will make sure that everything is put out there for you so that it's consistent across the board. It will also go and tell you what citation sites you're on and which ones you're not on. The other key important thing about all these citation sites is there are literally thousands of them, okay? You do not need to be on every single one of them. Only be on the ones that are relevant to you, okay? Quality is better than quantity, okay? Just because it's a site out there doesn't mean you have to be on it. Get on the good ones, get on the big ones. Make sure the ones that have a high traffic source like Yelp and Google and Facebook, make sure a TripAdvisor, make sure you're on those. There's other little tiny fringe ones that you probably don't need to be on unless it's a fringe one that's specifically for you. Okay? So there you go. There is a few things. Name, address, phone number, website, and all of these extras you want to be putting on Photos, videos, menus, reviews, and your hours of operation. Okay? That's important. Go and do a search for your own business. Go to Google, type in Google, type your business or restaurants near me where you are, and have a look at what pops up. And have a look at all of the different sites that are serving that business. They're the citations you want to be on. You make sure you're on them. If you're not on contact these sites, they will let you add those sites there for you, too. So you're going to do that, and then you are good as gold. All right, that is a wrap. That's reservations. Whiteboard Wednesday. Tomorrow, we're going to rip apart some Facebook ads. It may be your restaurant that we're looking at, or maybe not, but come along, check them out, and we'll show you exactly what you should and shouldn't be doing with your Facebook ads.
