Google Business Profile management for restaurants

The thirty seconds before a table gets booked

Dinner is chosen from a shortlist on the map, and the website is rarely opened at all. One screen has to answer what is on the card, what it costs, whether the kitchen is still sending food out and whether a table can be held for eight o'clock.

• Photographs of plated dishes and of the room settle whether the profile is opened at all, and a dark shot of an empty table sends the guest to the next pin.
• The card decides the rest. A guest looks for a main in their price bracket and for something the vegetarian in the party can eat, then leaves when neither is visible.
• Kitchen hours weigh more than door hours. Someone arriving at ten wants to know the pass is still working, not that the bar pours until midnight.
• The booking button is used at the moment of decision. If it opens a reservation system the restaurant stopped paying for, nobody phones instead, they choose the venue next door.
• Allergens and dietary options are read by whoever in the group cannot eat everything, and that one person often picks the venue for the rest.

The fields a venue with a kitchen has and others do not

Google opens extra fields for places that serve food. Filled honestly they carry a decision; filled halfway they describe an unfinished profile.

• Primary category by cuisine, because a pizzeria, a trattoria and a wine bar reach different searches even inside one building.
• The menu itself: sections, dishes and prices typed into the profile, or a link that opens the card in use this week instead of a PDF from a previous season.
• More hours split into separate lines: the pass, the bar, delivery, weekend brunch.
• Special hours for the days the restaurant behaves differently, from a private buyout to a stock take or the week the terrace opens.
• Booking and ordering links pointing only at the provider the restaurant pays for, checked by opening them until a reservation form appears.
• Dietary and accessibility attributes taken from the card, so vegan, gluten free and step free are set because the venue can deliver them.
• The questions guests leave on the profile about high chairs, a table for twelve, corkage or parking, answered by the venue and not by a passer by.

Card, kitchen hours, booking links, escalation: the order a month is worked in

These four run in this order for a reason. A price that is wrong makes every other field on the profile wrong, and a review about harm outranks whatever was scheduled for the week. Each step ends with a written row you can read.

1. 1

   The card gets one source, and the profile follows it

   A restaurant usually publishes three cards: the site, a PDF that gets mailed out, and the profile. You say which one is authoritative and who updates it. The manager then brings the profile to that one, line by line: dish, site, PDF, profile, decision. Google syncs none of them with each other.

2. 2

   Kitchen hours come apart from door hours

   One line of hours describes a room where the pass stops before the bar does. You confirm the real last order time for each day, and the kitchen, the bar, delivery and brunch get lines of their own, each logged as field, was, now, who approved it. Which extra hour types exist is set by Google.

3. 3

   Booking and ordering links are opened, not read

   Each link is opened by hand until a real reservation form appears. You name the service you pay for now and from what date; that one stays preferred, the others come off, and every removal gets a change log row. Links placed by Google's booking partners are taken down through the partner.

4. 4

   A review about harm takes the queue out of the schedule

   Text describing illness, an allergic reaction, a foreign object or a hurt guest stops the reply queue the day it lands. It reaches you before anything is drafted, you settle the wording and whether a lawyer sees it, and the record holds when it appeared, when it was handed over and who approved it.

Reviews about food, and the ones a manager must not touch

A complaint about a dish is a complaint about somebody's evening, and a reply that reads like a form letter confirms the guest's worst guess. Your manager writes in the voice you agreed on.

• A good review is answered by naming the dish and, where the guest named them, the person who brought it.
• A cold plate or a long gap between courses gets a short factual answer that you read before it goes up.
• When the same dish is criticized for a third time in a month, it goes to the kitchen inside the report instead of turning into three separate apologies.
• A review that describes a different venue, or comes from an account that never booked, is raised with Google, and Google rules on it alone.
• A cold delivery is scored on the restaurant even when the courier is somebody else's. Reviews are sorted by what they are about, the room, the pass or the delivery channel, and the summary shows which of the three the complaints sit in.

One dining room or several

1. Week 1

   Access moves to the team's own Google account and the first reconciliation sheet is written: every dish and price the profile currently shows, the door hours, the last order time, every link, every open review. You say which of those the manager may change without asking.

2. Week 2

   The first edits come straight off that sheet: the card brought level with the one in use, kitchen hours separated from door hours, dead booking links removed, the photographs swapped. Whatever Google had already altered is shown next to what it used to say.

3. Week 3

   The review backlog is worked through inside the package allowance, the first publication goes out from your materials, and anything said about a dish is copied into a note the kitchen receives.

4. Week 4

   The report and the sheet leave together: what matched, what did not, what was published and answered, what is worth doing before the next card. On Growth the content plan for the coming month is attached.

This is an example of how a first month tends to run in a restaurant. It describes no named venue and promises nothing: your own month depends on the package and on the state the profile is in.

Pizzerias, fast food and bars

Three neighbours of a restaurant that share the category and are then judged on something else entirely. The upkeep is one service; the fields that decide a visit are not.