Yelp isn’t your only discovery surface.
There are seven more.

Google, by a wide margin — but Yelp is not optional. Google Maps and the local pack drive roughly 60-70% of restaurant discovery clicks now; Yelp drives another 12-18%; OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Instagram, and aggregator delivery apps split the remainder. The strategic mistake we see most often is restaurants pouring 80% of review-generation effort into Yelp because Yelp's sales team is aggressive, while their Google Business Profile sits at 47 reviews. Reverse the priority: Google first, Yelp second, OpenTable / Resy third for reservation-driven concepts, TripAdvisor fourth for tourist-adjacent locations. Each platform weights review recency, velocity, and rating slightly differently, so you cannot treat them as a single bucket.

We tie a single review request workflow to a single trigger event — table close, check delivery, or order pickup — and route reviewers to different platforms based on a smart distribution rule rather than asking every guest to review on every platform. A typical split routes 60% of asks to Google, 20% to Yelp, 10% to OpenTable or Resy (for reservation guests only), and 10% to TripAdvisor (for guests on a tourist trail). The asks go out via SMS within 90 minutes of the dining experience while the meal is fresh. Most restaurants run review programs that ask 5-10% of guests; tied to the POS or reservation system, ask rates climb to 50%+ with completion rates of 30-40%. The math compounds — a 50-seat restaurant turning twice a night accumulates 60-90 reviews per quarter without staff doing anything beyond hitting send.

Menu schema is structured data (schema.org/Menu plus schema.org/MenuItem and schema.org/MenuSection) that tells Google exactly what dishes you serve, what they cost, what they contain, and how they relate to each other. Implemented well, it makes your menu eligible for rich-result treatments in search, lifts your relevance for dish-specific queries ('best carbonara near me,' 'vegan ramen Brooklyn'), and feeds Google's understanding of your restaurant as an entity. Most independent restaurants ship zero menu structured data — the menu lives as a PDF or an image embedded in a page, both of which are invisible to search. Building Menu + MenuItem schema across the full menu is a one-time engineering project that delivers compounding ranking lift across hundreds of long-tail dish queries. It is one of the highest-leverage technical wins in restaurant SEO and the easiest to verify your competitor has not done.

Yes. Google's image-recognition models are trained on real-world photography — composition, plating, lighting, the look of actual food on actual plates. Stock images and over-edited phone photos rank visibly worse in image search and carry less weight in the GBP photo ranking signals. Restaurants that ship real, well-lit, consistent food photography across their Google Business Profile, Google Posts, menu pages, Instagram-cross-linked content, and Yelp profile see measurably higher local-pack click-through rates and image-search visibility. The investment is not vanity — a professional photographer spending one half-day shooting your top 30 dishes returns photo assets that drive search visibility for the next two years. Most restaurants treat photography as brand work; we treat it as a structural SEO line item.

Reservation platforms function as both a discovery surface and an authority signal. Discovery: OpenTable and Resy both operate as search destinations themselves — guests open the app and search rather than going through Google. Ranking inside those platforms is a separate SEO discipline (profile completeness, photo quality, review velocity within the platform, response rate to messages, table-availability density). Authority: the reservation-platform listing creates a high-DA inbound link and a verified business citation that strengthens Google's confidence in your restaurant as a real entity. We optimize the reservation-platform profile alongside the brand site — same photos, same description tone, same response-rate discipline. For reservation-driven concepts, neglecting OpenTable or Resy SEO leaves real bookings on the table; for walk-in concepts, the listing still matters as an authority citation even if you take few reservations through it.

Yes. Single-location independents focus on hyperlocal-pack dominance, neighborhood-specific positioning ('best Italian in Williamsburg,' not 'best Italian in New York'), one Google Business Profile run obsessively, and a content layer that earns local-press citations. Multi-location groups need a parent-brand domain with location-specific subpages, distinct GBP listings per location each with its own primary entrance and phone, location-aware schema (LocalBusiness + Restaurant nested correctly, with separate OpeningHoursSpecification per location), per-location review velocity tracked separately, and brand-level content that lifts authority across all locations simultaneously. The most common multi-location mistake is one shared GBP listing across multiple locations, which is a Google Maps suspension risk and tanks per-location ranking. Each location gets its own listing, its own photo set, its own review pipeline — managed under one parent strategy.

Each delivery platform is a search destination with its own ranking algorithm, and ranking inside them drives delivery-channel revenue independent of any work you do on Google. The variables that move ranking inside DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub are (in rough order of weight) photo quality, menu completeness, ratings recency, on-time-delivery rate, accept-rate by the restaurant, and content freshness. The strategic question for most operators is the channel margin: delivery platforms charge 20-30% commission, which makes them margin-negative for many concepts unless owned-channel ordering (Toast Online, ChowNow, your own site) is also driving volume. We audit the channel mix, optimize the delivery-platform listings to capture the share you cannot escape, and build owned-channel SEO so direct online ordering captures the high-margin volume that does not need to flow through a marketplace.

GBP optimization wins move within 14-30 days — fixing primary category, completing services, posting weekly, ramping review velocity. Local-pack ranking shifts in 60-90 days for low-density neighborhoods, 4-6 months for mid-density urban areas, 6-9 months for the most competitive food cities (NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, Austin). The food-photography and Menu schema layer compounds slower — visible lift at 90-120 days, full impact across hundreds of long-tail dish queries at 6-12 months. Multi-platform review velocity is the most consistent driver: a restaurant going from 5 reviews per quarter to 60-90 per quarter typically sees rating, recency-signal, and ranking lift visible within 90 days regardless of city density. Most restaurant engagements show measurable cover-count or order-volume lift in months 3-5 and reach steady-state visibility around month 9.