Google Business Profile for pubs, restaurants and venues

A riverside pub leads two lives. On a Saturday in July the garden is full, the bar is three deep and nobody has time to wonder how they found you. On a Tuesday in February there are four tables, a quiet kitchen and a question about whether it is worth lighting the fryer. Your Google Business Profile has to work for both.

At the restaurants where I worked, the phone rang with the same three questions every Sunday. Are you open, can you fit us in, where do we park. A good profile answers all three before anyone picks up the phone. This post covers the settings, photographs, posts and review habits that decide who turns up on the map. Most of it takes an afternoon to set up and ten minutes a fortnight to keep right.

Claim it, then tidy it

Search for your own name in Google Maps on a phone. If you have not claimed the profile, do that first and go through Google's verification. If you find a second listing for the same premises, or one left behind by the previous tenant, report it to Google rather than leaving it to confuse people. One premises should have one profile.

The name and the category

Use your name exactly as it appears on the sign. Adding the town, a cuisine or a string of keywords to the name breaks Google's guidelines and can get a profile suspended, which is a bad week to find out in.

The primary category matters most. Choose the one that describes what the majority of your customers come for. A pub that is mainly known for its food might choose gastropub or restaurant. A hotel that hosts weddings might lead with hotel and add wedding venue. You can add more categories, up to nine beyond the primary one, but a short list of accurate ones does better than a long list of hopeful ones. A pub with a function room might add bar and event venue. Leave off anything you would not describe to a guest on the doorstep.

Then the description, which has a 750-character limit. Write what a guest would want to know. Where you are on the river, what you serve, what makes the place yours. Put the important part first, because the opening lines are what most people read. Google asks you to keep links, offers and prices out of it, so save those for your website and your posts.

Regular, kitchen and special hours

Set your regular opening hours first. Then add the extra hours Google offers for your category, if it offers them. For a restaurant or pub that usually includes kitchen hours, so the listing can show that the bar is open until eleven and the kitchen stops at nine. The options depend on your category and country, so look at what your own profile offers.

Special hours are for the dates that break the pattern. Bank holidays, Christmas Eve, an evening closed for a private party, regatta week in Henley, a bank holiday weekend in Windsor when everyone is out. Add them two or three weeks ahead. For a longer shutdown, such as a refit or a winter break, mark the business temporarily closed rather than leaving the usual hours up.

Change the profile on the day the terrace opens, and on the day it closes for the season. Then check that the hours on your website and booking page say the same thing. The listing people see first is the one they believe. The restaurant checklist in our post on what a riverside restaurant's website needs before Saturday service goes through the website side.

Tick the attributes that are true

Attributes are the short labels on your profile. Outdoor seating, dogs allowed, step-free entrance, live music, good for groups, takeaway, reservations accepted. Which ones you can choose depends on your category. They help Google match you to searches such as a pub garden by the river, and they answer questions before a guest has to ask.

Tick only what is true all year round, and change the seasonal ones when the season changes. A garden that is closed from October should not claim outdoor seating in November. If an attribute is a half-truth, leave it off and say the detail in the description or on your website.

Photographs

Photographs are the part of the profile guests spend longest on. Upload your own so that yours are the first they see.

• The entrance. Anyone arriving from the towpath or a car park is looking for a door.
• The outside space. The garden, the terrace and the view, in daylight.
• The room. The bar, the dining room and the private space, set up and empty.
• The food and drink. The dishes people order most, as they arrive.
• The people. A kitchen team or a front-of-house team gives the place a face.
• Events. For venues, photographs of a ceremony or a dinner, with the couple's permission.

Aim for bright, sharp, landscape images with no heavy filters, and add a few each season so the profile never looks abandoned. Customers will upload their own as well, and you cannot choose which ones appear, so give Google better ones to show.

Posts

Posts sit on your profile and suit anything with a date attached. The Sunday roast is back. Carol night is on the 20th. Tasting evening on Thursday. An open morning for couples who are looking at wedding venues. Add a button that links to the specific page, such as the menu, the booking page or the tour request, not the home page.

Do not write posts to chase rankings. Write them for the person who opens your profile and wants to know what is happening this month. One useful post a fortnight is better than a flurry in January and silence by March.

Menu, booking and tour links

These links turn a look into a booking. Point the menu link at the web menu, never at a PDF. Point the booking link at the booking page, and for a venue point the appointment link at a short route to book a tour. Check each link on your phone after any change to your website, because a redesign that moves a page quietly breaks the link on your profile.

Ask whoever looks after your website to tag these links, so that your analytics can tell you how many visits and bookings come from Google. It is the only way to know whether the profile is paying for itself.

Questions and answers

Google has been retiring the public Questions and answers section on business profiles and replacing it with AI-generated answers drawn from your profile, your reviews and your photographs. Whether you still see the section depends on where and when you look, so check your own listing on a phone.

The practical answer is to put the answers where Google can find them. The description, attributes, hours, menu, photographs and website should all say the same things. If the old Q&A is still showing on your profile, answer the questions in plain language, check what other people have answered on your behalf, and report anything wrong.

Reviews, and replying within the rules

Reviews are part of how Google decides who is prominent, and they are the first thing most guests read. Ask for them from everyone. A card on the table, a line on the receipt, a QR code at the till, a follow-up email after a wedding, all with a direct link to your review page.

Google's rules are clear about what you cannot do, and they apply to you as the owner.

• Do not offer a free drink, a discount or a raffle ticket in exchange for a review, positive or otherwise.
• Do not ask only the guests you think will be pleased. Selectively asking for good reviews is against the policy on fake engagement.
• Do not post reviews yourself, or ask staff, family or friends to do it.
• Do not push anyone to leave a review before they have left the table.

Reply to every review, in your own voice and briefly. To a good one, say thank you and mention something specific. To a bad one, thank them for raising it, say what you will look into, and offer a way to continue the conversation offline. Keep names, booking details and anything private out of a public reply. Do not argue. The person you are really writing to is the next guest, reading your reply a month from now.

If a review breaks Google's content rules, flag it. If it is fair and unwelcome, reply and fix the problem. Our post on reviews that actually help local rankings goes further on asking and replying.

If you are a venue as well as a bar

Venues that work by appointment need to say so. Put it in the description, link the appointment button to a page where couples can book a tour, and show tour times on that page instead of leaving people to guess. Add wedding venue or event venue as an additional category if it is a true part of the business, and fill the photographs with the spaces as they look set up for a ceremony and a dinner.

Treat the profile as the front door and the website as the hallway. A couple who taps through from the profile should land on the page that answers their question, which is usually pricing, capacity or the tour booking, not the home page.

A fortnightly ten minutes

Put this in the diary, ideally on a slow Tuesday.

• Search for your own name in Maps on a phone and look at what a guest sees.
• Check the hours and special hours for the next three weeks.
• Add two or three new photographs.
• Post if there is something with a date.
• Reply to new reviews.
• Tap the menu, booking and website links.
• Look for suggested edits you did not make, and reject any that are wrong.

If you would rather have it set up and kept right, that is the heart of our local SEO and Google Business Profile work. If you run a venue as well as a bar, the websites for Thames wedding venues page shows how the profile and the website fit together.