Your Google Business Profile: what restaurants should fix first

Your profile is the homepage now, whether you like it or not

Someone searches your name, or searches for dinner near where they are standing, and gets a panel: your photos, your hours, your rating, a button to call you. Plenty of guests decide from that panel and never open your website at all. It is the most visited page you do not own.

One. Your opening hours, including the days you are shut

Hours are the single most common thing that is wrong on a restaurant profile, and the most expensive. A guest who drives over on a Monday to a dark window does not update your profile for you. They write a review.

Set the normal week, then set the special hours for holidays before the holiday, not during it. Google asks about them for a reason: a profile that has confirmed its holiday hours shows that confirmation to the person searching.

Two. The photos, and who took them

On most profiles, guest photos outnumber the owner's by a wide margin, which means your profile looks like whatever your guests' phones look like. You cannot delete those. You can add enough of your own that the first row of the gallery is yours.

• The room, empty and lit the way it looks at eight in the evening.
• Three or four plates that you actually still serve.
• The front of the building, so people recognise it from the street.
• The people, because every other restaurant only posts food.

Three. Your categories

The primary category is the strongest signal you control. “Restaurant” is a weak choice if something more precise fits: bistro, pizzeria, brasserie, wine bar. Add the secondary categories that are genuinely true and leave the ones that are not, because they pull you into searches you cannot satisfy.

Four. Posts, if you can keep a rhythm

One post a week, forever, beats five in an afternoon and then nothing until Christmas. A profile that has posted in the last month reads as open. That is most of what a post does. Anything you are already writing counts: the new menu, a closed week, the terrace opening.

Five. The questions nobody answers

There is a questions section on your profile, and anybody can answer it, including strangers who are guessing. You can ask and answer your own. Do the four you get asked at the door every week: parking, dogs, high chairs, whether you can do gluten free.

What you can ignore

Anyone promising you the top of the map for your town is selling something. Nobody controls that ranking, and the ones who claim they do usually get there by adding keywords to your business name, which is against Google's rules and can get your profile suspended. The boring list above is the part you actually control.