For a lot of people, your listing is the whole visit.
Name, stars, a photo, open or closed, a call button, directions. They never tap through to your website. Here is what is in that block, what each part of it does, and the one piece nobody can sell you.
Somebody two miles away searches for lunch on their phone.
What comes back is a block with your name in it, a star rating, one photograph, the word Open or the word Closed, a button that calls you and a button that drives them to you. They can ring, drive over, or scroll straight past, and your website never enters into it. For that search, the listing is the storefront.
It is also the piece almost everybody sets up once, in an afternoon, years ago, and has not opened since. That is the good news. Nearly everything wrong with a listing is free to fix, needs no code written, and can be done from a phone in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
What each part of it actually does.
- The primary categoryOne category, and it decides which searches you are eligible to turn up in at all. Pick the one that names what you actually are, then go and look at what the two places ranking above you are filed under.
- The other categoriesA short list, not everything you have ever sold. A profile claiming eleven categories mostly tells Google you are not sure what you are.
- Hours, and the holidaysWrong hours cost you twice. Somebody drives across town and finds the lights off, and somebody searching at nine at night never sees you at all because you dropped out of the open-now filter.
- The attributesTakeout, delivery, dine-in, curbside, reservable. These are not decoration, they are the filters people tap. My report reads them straight off your listing, and unset is not the same as no — unset means you get left out of both answers.
- PhotosYours, recent, of the food, of the room, and of the front of the building so somebody can recognise it from a moving car. Not the stock plate of pasta the template came with.
- The website linkPoint it at the page that answers the search. If people are finding you looking for catering, the catering page is a better landing than the front page is.
- The descriptionPlain sentences about what you cook, where you are and what you are known for. It is not a keyword bin, and stuffing it reads to a customer exactly like stuffing it.
- Replies to reviewsAll of them, the bad ones especially, short and without arguing. It is the one part of a listing that future customers read as a personality test.
The only thing that moves the number is new reviews.
There is no other lever, and it is worth being blunt about that. You cannot have a review taken down because you disagree with it, and neither can anybody who offers to do it for money. Buying them breaks the rules, is detectable, and I will not do it. What is left is asking — at the moment somebody is happiest, which is not three days later in an email nobody opens.
Two numbers from my own audit, and they are mine rather than research. Below about 4.3 stars I flag the rating, because that is roughly where people stop reading and scroll to the next result. Under twenty-five reviews I flag the count, because that is not enough weight to hold up beside a busier place two streets over. Those are the lines I chose. Somebody else would draw them somewhere slightly different and would not be wrong.
Recency does as much work as the pile does. Forty reviews with the newest one from 2023 reads worse than fifteen with three from this month, to a person and probably to Google as well. A steady trickle beats one good push, which is why the ask has to be something that runs on its own rather than something you remember to do.
What nobody can promise you.
Distance is not for sale.
Google publishes what it weighs for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. You can move relevance by filling the profile in properly, and prominence by earning reviews and getting mentioned in real places. Nobody can move distance. Your restaurant cannot be made nearer to somebody standing four towns away, so anybody selling you a guaranteed number one is selling you the one of the three that was never for sale.
There is no schedule.
Things change when Google decides they change. The work is an afternoon; whether it shows in a week or in two months is not up to me, and anybody who gives you a date for it is guessing at you.
A correct listing gets you looked at, not chosen.
It puts you in the results with the right hours and a photograph that is actually yours. What happens next is your food, your prices and your reviews, and none of those are a settings screen.
I cannot make a bad review disappear.
What I can do is set up the asking, so the bad one you already have stops being a fifth of your rating. That is arithmetic rather than a favour, and it takes months rather than a weekend.
Do these on your own phone before you talk to anybody.
Me included. All five are free and none of them need an account, a tool or a login you do not already have.
- 01
Search your own name.
Not on your laptop, on your phone, and not while standing in your own dining room if you can help it. Look at the block that comes back the way a stranger would.
Looking for: Are the hours right, and is the next holiday set?
- 02
Tap the website link.
Watch where it lands you. A lot of listings point at a page that was replaced two rebuilds ago, or at a homepage when the search was clearly about one thing.
Looking for: Is that the page you would have chosen for that search?
- 03
Scroll the photos.
Go past the first three. Somewhere in there is usually a picture a customer took in 2019 of a dish you stopped making, and it is doing more work than anything you have uploaded.
Looking for: How many are yours, and when was the newest one taken?
- 04
Read your last five reviews.
Not the rating, the reviews. Read them the way somebody deciding between you and the place next door would read them, which is quickly and looking for a reason to rule you out.
Looking for: What is the date on the newest one, and did anybody reply?
- 05
Look at your primary category.
Then find the two places ranking above you for the search you care about and look at theirs. This is a two-minute job and it is the highest-leverage thing on this list.
Looking for: Are you filed as the thing people are searching for?
Marietta is home and metro Atlanta is the patch. This is the one piece of the job I could do entirely from a laptop, and I would still rather come out — the photographs on a listing ought to be of your room on a day it looked like itself, and there is no way to take those over email.
The rest of it
- Every systemEight systems and the website under them: what each one does, what it needs from you, and its price.
- PricingThe packages for trucks and restaurants, the discount for building more than one at once, and the terms.
- Online orderingWhy marking a plate up on the app raises the fee with it, and what your own order page has to do to be worth having.
- WebsitesThe ten things I measure on a food business site, the thresholds I measure them against, and what each one costs you.
- AI phoneWhat an AI phone line does on a real call, what it gets wrong, and how to catch it getting things wrong in week one.
- Food trucksWhat it costs to run a text list, why a location page has to admit when it is out of date, and when a truck is better off not buying one.
- Start hereThe homepage, and the free report — type your name, it pulls your Google listing and your site and tells you what it finds. About ten seconds, no email.
Send me your business name and I will tell you what your listing is missing.