How guests find and book restaurants on Google

Your Google listing is often the first thing a guest sees. How to get your Google Business Profile right: hours and holiday hours, photos, your menu, your website and booking link, answering reviews, posts, and keeping your details the same everywhere.

Before many guests see your website, they see your Google listing. They search your name, or "restaurants near me", and Google shows them your hours, photos, reviews and a few buttons. Whether they book often comes down to what they find there.

The good news: the listing is free, and you control most of it through your Google Business Profile. Here's what to check, roughly in the order guests notice it.

A drawn Google listing for a sample venue, The Bistro, with photos, opening hours and Book online, Menu and Directions buttons, beside four numbered tips.

Claim it and check the basics

If you've never claimed your profile, do that first. Google will ask you to verify that the business is yours. Then check the details guests rely on:

• Your name exactly as it is on your sign, with no extra words added.
• Your address and map pin. Open the map and make sure the pin sits on your front door, not the car park behind.
• A phone number that someone actually answers.
• A category that matches what you are, such as Italian restaurant, café or pub.
• A short description in plain words: what you serve, the feel of the place, who it suits.

Hours, including holidays

Wrong opening hours are the quickest way to lose a guest's trust. Keep your regular hours right, and add special hours for every day that's different: bank holidays, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Hogmanay, and any days you close for a break.

Set them a few weeks ahead, not on the morning. Our Christmas booking checklist has this year's dates.

Photos that show the real place

Guests use photos to decide whether you're their kind of place. Add your own, and refresh them each season:

• The outside, in daylight, so people recognise the door.
• The inside, at a busy, friendly moment.
• Your best-selling dishes and drinks, as they really arrive.
• Your team, if they're happy to be in it.

Guests will add photos too. Yours set the tone.

Your menu

People want to know what they'll eat, and roughly what it costs, before they book. Link your menu from your profile and make sure the page it opens is the menu you serve today, not last spring's PDF. Mark vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes clearly, because guests look for them.

Your website and your booking link

Your profile has a website field, and for restaurants Google can show a link for bookings too. Put your website (or the page that acts as one) in the first and your booking page in the second, so a guest can go from search to booked in a few taps.

A word on booking buttons. Some booking providers are partners in Google's own booking programme, which can put a booking form inside Google itself. Adding your own booking link is a different thing: it's a link you choose, it opens your own booking page, and it's free to add.

If you take orders for collection or delivery, Google can show an order link as well. The same rule applies: point it at the page you want guests to use.

Answer your reviews

Reply to reviews, the kind ones and the hard ones. A short, personal thank-you shows there's a real person reading. For a bad review, stay calm, thank them for telling you, put right anything that's fair, and offer to talk it through away from Google. Future guests read your reply as closely as the review.

To get more reviews, ask. A link straight to your review form, in a thank-you email or on a card with the bill, makes it easy. Ask every guest, not only the ones you think loved it, and never offer anything in return for a review: Google's rules don't allow it.

Post now and then

Posts are short updates that show on your listing: a new menu, a Christmas party night, a gift card for the season, a quiz. They don't need to be clever. A photo and a couple of lines once or twice a month keeps your listing looking cared for.

Keep everything consistent

Google builds its picture of you from your profile, your website, your social profiles and other listings. When your name, address, phone number and hours match everywhere, guests and Google can both trust what they see. Whenever something changes, update your Google profile first, then everywhere else, on the same day.

Six steps from search to booking: a guest searches, finds your profile, checks hours, photos and menu, taps your booking link, books on your booking page, and gets a confirmation

If you use ResoFlow

• Get more bookings has a Google channel with your booking link ready to copy and the steps to add it to your profile, free on every plan. See How do I take bookings from Google?
• That adds your own booking link to your Google profile. ResoFlow isn't part of Google's Reserve with Google partner programme.
• Your free venue page makes a good website link if you don't have a site of your own, and its cuisine and price range are passed to search engines.
• The review request email can send guests to your Google review link, on Plus and above. See How do I send thank-yous and ask for reviews?

Your Google profile itself is edited on Google; ResoFlow can't change it for you.

Using ResoFlow? Ask Rezo from your dashboard, or email [email protected].