An English couple arrive in Costa Adeje on a Tuesday afternoon, drop their bags and take out their phones. They don't open Instagram: they open the map and type “restaurants near me”. What happens in the next ten seconds decides where they have dinner.
That moment is, by far, the biggest source of new customers a restaurant in the south of Tenerife has. And hardly anyone works on it.
What Google looks at to choose who it shows
Google boils it down to three factors, and they're worth understanding because two of them are in your hands:
- Distance. How close you are to the person searching. You can't change this: it's geography.
- Relevance. How well your profile matches what they typed. This depends on the category you've chosen, the description, the dishes you've listed and the attributes.
- Prominence. How well known you are: reviews, average rating, mentions, links, traffic to your website.
In other words: between two restaurants that are equally close, the one with the more complete profile and more review activity shows up first. That's what you can work on.
What needs fixing, in order of impact
The primary category
It carries the most weight and it's what most people have set up wrong. A Neapolitan pizza place with the generic “Restaurant” category competes with everyone; with “Neapolitan pizza restaurant” it appears when someone searches for exactly that. There's only one primary category, and you need to choose it wisely.
Photos, and new ones
Google rewards active profiles. Uploading photos every month —food, interior, exterior, staff— has an effect, and it's also the first thing people see when they find you. A profile with four dark photos from 2021 loses out to the one next door, even if the food is better at yours.
Reviews, and above all the replies
The number and frequency of reviews count towards your position. And replying to them counts twice: for Google, which sees activity, and for the person reading before they decide. A bad review answered calmly is more convincing than five good ones in a row.
The details nobody fills in
- Opening hours, including bank holidays and your closing day
- Linked menu and average price
- Attributes: terrace, wheelchair accessible, vegan options, child-friendly, parking
- Booking link, if you have one
- Questions and answers: if you don't answer them, anyone else can
Many of those attributes are search filters. If you haven't ticked “terrace”, you won't appear when someone filters by terrace, even if yours is the best on the street.
And the map almost nobody looks at: Apple
A large share of the tourists who come to the island carry an iPhone, and the map it comes with is Apple Maps, not Google. That listing —Apple Business Connect— is free, can be claimed in no time and is practically empty for almost every restaurant in the area. It's one of the few easy advantages left.
How long it takes to make a difference
It isn't immediate. Getting your profile into shape shows up within weeks in the number of views, and within months in your map position, because the prominence part depends on new reviews coming in steadily.
The upside is that, once you get there, you don't pay per click. It's one of the few things in digital marketing that keeps working in the month you decide not to invest.