If you are a restauranteur, one of your top priorities for your business should include searching for venues online to showcase your menu to the public to attract more bookings to your restaurant. Not only does this give you a great spike to your store visits but also traffic to your website.
Google My Business has created a way for you to present your restaurant menu conveniently to your customers in the search engine results page. This will allow customers to view all the information they need to make a decision to secure that booking.
Google released this feature on 1 February 2018 for businesses in the food industry and appears in results based on what category your business falls under.
Currently available only on GMB’s mobile app, this feature has been available via API for a little while now but Google has created an editor feature in the backend of Google My Business where you can quickly add and edit your menu.
What do you need to know about Google My Business Menu?
- Google announced that at the moment they’re only offering this feature for English speaking listings.
- The first thing we looked into is whether or not this can be used for other industries that utilise menus such as beauty spas or businesses that have a list of services. Sadly, Google confirmed it’s just for establishments with food menus right now but will be looking into potential further expansion, including expanding it globally and to other business types. So hang tight, hopefully, we’ll have this awesome feature for other categories soon.
- We had a play around adding some menus and the results updated within a minute or two on mobile and desktop.
- Customers love to check out a menu before making a booking so this feature is going to satisfy your customers’ needs without them even clicking onto your website! It’s an interesting time as we are starting to push customers to our websites less with features like this. So clicks might decrease because there is less need to view the website especially if no booking is required, but hopefully, conversions will increase which is way more important in the long run.
How to add your Google My Business Menu: A step-by-step guide
- Log in to your Google My Business account, if you haven’t claimed your account yet, we can help you verify it free and fast.
- Once in your account, go to “Manage Location”, “Info” then “Menu” you will find the menu section just after the Reservations URL and before Accessibility.
- Click on “Menu” and the below page will appear for you to get building out your menu. We broke the menus into different sections like mains, desserts and you can even add set menus or special event menus.
- You can also add a description for some of the dishes if there is any additional detail you want to add, perhaps something about where the produce is from or if it was prepared in a special way.
- Once you have started adding a few items from the menu you will see the items start to build out like below, you can change the order around and edit as required. We are loving this new menu feature from the Google My Business team!
- Once you have entered everything into the backend you will find the menu displaying in the SERP, also you will see from the image below it is showing up in the normal maps section so below the paid ads but above the organic listing. The menu feature has a very prominent spot in the SERP and we are looking forward to seeing how this changes customer behaviour.
What else is new with Google My Business for Restaurants
Video Reviews
Customers can now record a video while at your venue and they can post it on Google My Business as a video review. The video doesn’t fall into the normal review section but into the video tab in the photos section. Taking a video and showing the restaurant and the atmosphere is a great thing for restaurants as the potential customer will be able to have a quick peek before arriving.
On the other hand, you don’t want to be caught in the act doing anything you wouldn’t be happy to have on Google 🙂
Google Posts
We have blogged about these before and provided details on how to set up and awesome Google post for your business, but we wanted to share some of our findings so far having created lots of Google posts for our customers. Even though they look beautiful, when we first started posting we found that the posts were getting thousands of impressions but 0 conversions even when promoting something super exciting! Throughout the past couple of months though we have started to see behaviours change and more than ever customers are click and engaging with the posts we share. We predict that within the next 6 months more and more customers are going to become familiar with this feature (even though hardly any businesses are taking advantage of it!) and conversions will continue to rise. Google posts are a great way to highlight any special events you have coming up, maybe a new dish on the menu or maybe letting the world know who your head chef is and why he’s a legend! Google Posts are also a free way to shout your message out on the SERP (search engine results page)
Questions & Answers
The final tip for today is to make sure you are keeping an eye out to ensure all customers questions are getting an answer, and that it’s the right answer. Customers can now ask restaurants and any other business questions on your Google My Business page and other customers or the business can respond.
Q: What’s the best dish on the menu?
A: The restaurant is famous for its lamb, I tried it and I get why people go crazy for it.
Q: How much is a cup of coffee?
A: A flat white is $3.60
