5 ways to protect your restaurant's online reputation

The restaurant industry is everchanging and owners are constantly having to stay one step ahead. With the recent increase in online reputation attacks — especially those targeting restaurants — it's more important than ever to protect your brand reputation on the web. Drawing on 10 years of online reputation management, we've distilled down five best practices for protecting your brand's online reputation.

1. Control your listings
Ensure you have control over all your brand's online listings, including Google, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor, for all your locations. OpenTable, GrubHub and DoorDash are also key where relevant. We live in a world where there are individuals who thrive off of impersonation. By having control of your pages already, it makes it much easier to regain control should any reputation attacks or threats happen.

2. Monitor pages regularly for unusual activity
Many customers will take to Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor to get a better idea of your business' reputation, so it's important to monitor location pages regularly (ideally, every day) and respond to customers This step is especially important in catching unusual one-star activity and stopping attacks in their tracks. If you notice an influx of one-star reviews, especially without additional feedback or comments, consider these factors to assess their credibility: How many other reviews do they have? Do they have friends (for Yelp only)? How old is the account? Are most of the reviews negative? Do they have a site accreditation (i.e., Local Guide)? If so, what level (i.e., Elite Status)?

3. Contact each platform
While it's a general best practice to address all customer feedback online, the best route is not to engage with a review that falls under the "unusual activity" category. Instead of replying publicly, contact the review platform where you received the unusual one-star reviews and cite their content guidelines relevant to the circumstance (i.e., hearsay, hate speech, impersonation, etc.) and flag the reviews for removal. If you receive an email demanding compensation as a follow-up to the unusual review, make the sites aware of the threat. For Facebook specifically, turn off the Reviews Feature on all pages until the issue is resolved. This prevents scammers from posting more reviews that will hurt your brand's overall rating on Facebook.

4. Stay vigilant
Unfortunately, we've seen a rise in targeted reputation attacks that have affected many restaurant brands across the country. It's important to maintain awareness — not only about your own brand, but what other brands are also experiencing — so that you aren't losing sight of the industry-wide landscape. Some attacks have been widespread enough to catch media attention, which helps raise importance so the platforms take swift action in removing the spam reviews.

5. Utilize a review monitoring system
A review monitoring system can help identify and flag suspicious reviews before they get out of hand. Maintaining your online reputation is vital to the success of your business. Having a dedicated team or platform to discover and dispute fake reviews makes a tremendous difference, especially when it comes to preventing further escalation. When utilizing a customer engagement and feedback platform, you can quickly identify key issues and make adjustments to protect your brand's coveted online reputation — all of which can help boost revenue.
We've found that increasing your brand's online rating by one star can increase revenue up to 24%, so you can imagine what a drastic decrease in your online reputation can do to your brand.

Using a single guest engagement platform will result in shortening the time it takes for a review, comment, post, or message to be addressed. This can mitigate sales losses and their negative impact on your brand's equity. Restaurants are in a sink or swim world — don't let your online reputation flounder.