Google is the most powerful search engine available: it has more than 90% of search engine market share, with approximately 70,000 searches every second and over 2 trillion every year.
NB: This is an article from Eat App
If you are a restaurant operator, odds are your establishment is showing up in hundreds of Google searches every month within your area, where people look for an answer to a simple question: Where should I eat?
For restaurants, the search engine has become even more important after the launch in 2018 of Reserve with Google. This feature allows hungry diners to reserve directly from a restaurant’s Google My Business listing and is integrated with Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Voice Assistant.
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Combining Google My Business (GMB for short) with Reserve with Google can be a powerful way to generate more bookings for your restaurant. In this post we’ll explain all you need to know to make the best of both.
Why your Restaurant Needs a Google My Business Listing
Simply put, Google My Business is a completely free marketing channel. When it’s set up properly, GMB can help restaurants:
- Be more visible in Google searches and easily display essential information such as hours, website, address, and phone number. This is particularly important if your website is still under construction
- Read and respond to customer reviews and post photos of the venue and the food
- Know how many people called directly from the listing, or how many clicks each part of the listing received.
GMB is optimized particularly well for smartphones.
The listing shows up before search results on mobile, and to the right of organic search results on desktop.
It features a horizontal navigation menu with basic info, a prominent ‘RESERVE A TABLE’ button (we’ll explain how to use it in the section below about Google Reservations), reviews, more search results etc.
The reason why Google makes sure GMB is easily accessible on mobile screens can be best explained with this data:
– More than 80% of people search the web to find local information
– When visiting a restaurant or bar, 61% of people used their phone
– Restaurant and food-related searches like “restaurants,” “restaurants near me,” and “food near me” commonly appear in the top 20 searches for many retailers
– Travelers most frequently use their mobile devices to research activities or attractions, to locate shopping areas and restaurants, or to look up directions
If you haven’t set up a GMB listing yet (or you haven’t claimed it), you can do it from here. The process takes no more than 15 minutes and can be incredibly rewarding for your restaurant.
Google Reservations: What it is and Why it’s Important
Getting the basics of GMB right is very important to make your restaurant listing more visible and get people to open it. In the next section we’ll give you a few recommendations on how to optimize your GMB listing.
Before that though, let’s look at a powerful way to drive bookings to your restaurant: by adding a ‘Reserve a table’ button.
