We've all heard it. Real estate is crucially important. If you have a bad location, you're gonna spend a ton on marketing to try to get people there but if you've got a great location that's perfect for your concept with great foot traffic, you're not gonna have to spend that much money on marketing.

So, sometimes spending more on rent is better, than saving on rent and needing to spend it on marketing but that's not what we're talking about here today. I'm talking about your online real estate.

Today, second to your physical location and dare I even say, more important, maybe more important than your physical location is your online re, like what your website address is. That used to be crucially important.

The most important real estate you can have, I think, is possibly online, but the most important online real estate you can have is your reputation, your online reputation.

Sure, sit here tell me I hate Yelp, I hate TripAdvisor, I hate all those. Great! I hate them too but I also love them. See the difference is if you're just looking at all the negatives of it. You're, you're trying to look at it from a way that I can't control it, I have nothing to do with it, people are such jerks, they're putting these terrible reviews up but if you take control of the online review process and you get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand four and five-star reviews, your restaurant is going to skyrocket.

Now, in this article, I'm not getting into the specifics of how we do this. I'm just saying, you better fall in love with online review sites and you better prioritize this as maybe the most important real estate for your restaurant ever or at least it's going that way because if you ignore it and you proceed with 5 reviews or 20 reviews or 30 reviews or three stars and you complain about it and don't do something about it, you're gonna get hurt.

I have heard recently about restaurants trying to expand to other locations and landlords are denying them leases because their original location has three stars.

No landlord wants to be associated with that. They want four and a half, they want five, they want four stars in their locations. They don't want to take a risk on someone who might fail with three stars.

Or how about this, let's assume you're doing all this great marketing, right. You got Facebook ads, you've got Facebook, you got Twitter, you got social media, maybe you're doing some newspaper, radio whatever, if someone has never heard of your restaurant and now they have heard of your restaurant, you've created the awareness?

Now, we have to turn them into a customer. What's the first thing someone's gonna do when they go from, "Huh, never heard of that place, let me check it out" to wanting to go and become a customer.

They're gonna Google you, that's right. And when they Google you, what's gonna show up? If I Google your restaurant, let's say for instance I google “wings at Hooters.” What's the first thing that shows up? Well, right now I'm telling you the first thing that should show up is their website.

The second thing that shows up, should be 500 reviews or a thousand reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato any of those online websites with four and a half stars for your restaurant.

If you're not in the multiple hundreds of reviews, four and a half stars just under your website, you are not controlling the most important real estate for your restaurant, which is online.

It's the only way you're gonna convert someone who has just now heard of you or a friend told them about you into a customer.

But if you're not gonna have someone else do it for you, you better start figuring out how to do this yourself because your online real estate is possibly the most important real estate for your restaurant ever.