The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Marketing a restaurant? You already know what a huge role online reviews play in your reputation, rankings, and revenue, with 98% of US adults reading this content and 86% writing it. You may have read that there’s a demonstrable Google local ranking boost when a brand-new restaurant gets its first ten reviews. You may also have seen that many experts consider your overall Google review rating to be the sixth most important of all local search ranking factors.
But have you advanced yet to full use of Google reviews as a source of business intelligence for the brands you’re marketing? Formal surveys can be costly to run, so don’t overlook the free, ongoing sentiment analysis shorthand offered right on your listings in the form of Google Place Topics, telling you at-a-glance what real-world attributes inspire reviewers to get typing. These most compelling offline components, aggregated by Google online, can give insights into the areas a business should focus on most.
Back in 2020, I examined Place Topic trends for US grocery stores. Today, I’ll do the same for restaurants, and I want to emphasize that this is a case study you can do for any industry to get a sense of what drives customers to take the time to leave reviews. Given the impact of reviews on business viability, this type of study is a very smart thing to engage in!
Methodology
I wanted to find out which factors inspire the most mentions in restaurant reviews. This small survey looks at 250 data points. I found the top-ranked business for the phrase restaurant+city (like “restaurant sacramento”) in all 50 US state capitals. I then recorded the top 5 place topics for each restaurant, put them in a spreadsheet, and after reviewing the data, realized I could bucket the findings into three main categories: food & drink, amenities, and other.
But first, what is a Google Place Topic?
If you navigate from a Google Business Profile to the full review overlay, you’ll see a section right below the star rating labeled “People often mention.” Place Topics consist of this row of clickable tabs displaying the words that come up most in the review set, including the number of times each phrase was mentioned.
Restaurant review results
Here’s what I’ve learned:
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64% of reviews for the top-ranked restaurants in state capitols across the US mention food & drink most prominently.
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24% mention amenities prominently.