Let's start of 2011 with a way to find and do business with excellent local small businesses. One tool I use, especially for restaurants, is Yelp.com.
I'll present a step by step way of locating the best of class local businesses within their category and geography. For this example, I'll locate Mexican restaurants within Orange County, California. We'll also do a search by city using Anaheim, Calfornia, but I will show how that is more of a limited search and does not provide the best results as some of the better restaurants are outside the city.
Ok here it goes:
1) Go to Yelp.com (in another browser session of course).
2) At the top, in the Near (Address, Neighborhood, City, State or Zip) text box, type in Orange County, CA and press enter.
3) Near the top, under Browsing Orange County Businesses, click Restaurants (if you can't find out, hit control+f, type in the word restaurants to locate it on the webpage).
4) Once again, near the top, under Restaurants Orange County, click Mexican (control+f to search for it if necessary).
5) Ok now we need to sort all the Mexican restaurants in Orange County, CA so that the best ones appear on top of the list. Near the top, under Mexican Orange County click Highest Rated and the restaurant El Toro Bravo will appear as the first one. It gets 4.5 stars out of 5 stars (located to the right of the restaurant name) which is pretty good! It's located in Costa Mesa which is a bit far from me, but if I was in the area and I was hungry for Mexican (of course the family would have to approve Mexican), I would go there as my first choice for Mexican. Note that there's an INTERACTIVE map (you can move the map and also zoom in/out) that shows all the restaurants on that page. It's helpful when locating businesses close to you.
6) Let's click on El Toro Bravo and we will sort by date since the latest reviews are most accurate. Maybe the owners changed or there was a change to the food for the better or worse. Scroll down 1 screen down to the Sort By section. It's kind of hidden. It starts right above the first review. Do a control+f and look for Sort By if you cannot find it. Once found, on the same line, click on Date. Now it shows the newest reviews first. If you want to see the oldest reviews first, click on Date again.
As an additional demonstration, let's search in the City of Anaheim, CA. You will notice that the best restaurants do not come up because we limited ourselves just to the city and not the county. I prefer to search by County. Sometimes the County is too big, like Los Angeles County. Then, I would have to type in the city and also try the surrounding cities. Perhaps, I would also use the zipcode.
1) At the top, in the Near (Address, Neighborhood, City, State or Zip) text box, type in Anaheim, CA and press enter.
2) Near the top, under Browsing Anaheim Businesses, click Restaurants
3) Near the top, under Restaurants Anaheim, click Mexican
4) Let's sort the Mexican restaurants in Anaheim, CA so that the best ones appear on top of the list. Near the top, under Mexican Anaheim click Highest Rated and the restaurant Anepalco's Cafe will appear as the first one. Once again, note that there's an INTERACTIVE map that shows all the restaurants on that page.
5) Lastly, sort by date. Follow step 6 from above.
Ummm... I like to do Highest Rated rather than Most Reviewed. I find it more accurate. Accuracy is the name of the game. The most frequented restaurants are not necessarily the best ones. A lot of times, they're the cheapest ones that the masss go to. A lot of chains will score high under Most Reviewed. Face it, most of the time, most people are not looking for better food, oonly the cheapest.
If you want to see the reviews on a particular restaurant/business, on the Yelp.com page, just type in the name of the restaurant/business and city or zipcode at the top.
I hope this has been helpful. I know I didn't do screenshots (too lazy). Maybe some of you use Yelp.com to locate businesss in other categories such as flowers, car wash, etc. I'd be interested what other categories are popular on Yelp.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment