Before an agency touches your coffee shop's Google listing

Late February is a quiet stretch for most coffee shops. The holiday gift card rush is over, iced drinks have not taken off outside the South, and the morning line is mostly regulars. It is also when agencies call. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 State of the Industry report, released this month, projects $1.55 trillion in restaurant and foodservice sales this year, and every agency selling to food businesses has read it.

Some of those pitches will help. Plenty are a restaurant package with the word coffee pasted in. A cafe is not a dinner spot. The choice is made in seconds, on the way somewhere, and the money is in how often the same person comes back. Here is what we would want a cafe owner to ask any agency, ourselves included, before handing over the keys to the Google listing.

Start with the hours, because the person searching does

Ask: “What will you check first on my listing?” A good answer starts with hours.

Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and popularity, and that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show. For a cafe, accurate hours carry more weight than for almost any other business, because so many coffee searches are really “open now” searches made a few blocks from the door. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, published in November, asked 47 local search experts to score what drives the map pack, and they placed being open at the time of the search fifth.

So the agency should be asking you things like:

• What time does the door actually open on weekdays and weekends, and does Google say the same?
• Do you close early for snow or on slow holiday weeks, and who posts that change?
• Have you set special hours for the next holiday, even if they match your normal ones? Google itself advises confirming holiday hours either way.
• Is Wi-Fi set as an attribute, for the people searching for somewhere to work for an hour?

If nobody in the first meeting has opened your listing on a phone at a quarter to seven, that tells you how the work will go.

Ask how they will get reviews, and listen for the word free

Ask: “How will you get me more Google reviews?”

BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, published earlier this month, found 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 74% only care about reviews written in the last three months. A cafe with two hundred reviews and nothing new since October looks tired to someone choosing between you and the shop across the street.

The wrong answer is the one plenty of counters already display: a card offering a free cookie or a drink for a review. Google’s contribution policy bans offering incentives, free goods included, in exchange for posting any review, and bans pressuring people to review while they are on the premises. That holds even when the card asks for an honest opinion. The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, in effect since October 21, 2024, targets rewards tied to a positive review and lets courts impose civil penalties for knowing violations. The FTC’s own example of an illegal implied condition comes from a restaurant: a coupon offered to anyone who will “tell us how much you loved your visit”.

The right answer is plain and it works. A neutral request after a mobile order, a line on the printed receipt, and an owner’s reply on every review. The same BrightLocal survey found 89% of consumers expect owners to respond. That rhythm is how our review management runs, and any agency should be able to describe its own as plainly.

Ask where the orders will go

Ask: “What happens when someone wants to order ahead?”

The National Coffee Association’s fall 2025 survey found that 59% of people who bought coffee away from home in the past week did so at a drive-through, and 36% ordered through an app. For an independent shop, the app is usually the ordering and loyalty tools that come with the point of sale. An agency that never asks about your ordering setup is planning to market around the part of the business that brings people back.

Good questions from their side sound like this. Which ordering system do you use? Is there an order link on your Google listing, and where does it lead? How many guests are in your loyalty program, and how does a barista invite new ones? Do you know how often an enrolled guest returns?

What the first ninety days should look like for a cafe

A plan we would put our name to for a coffee shop runs in this order:

• Week one, a baseline. Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the listing, plus app orders and loyalty sign-ups, written down before anything changes.
• Weeks one to three, the listing. Hours, holiday dates, the primary category, attributes, the menu as text, and photos. Google asks food and drink businesses to add at least three photos of what they serve, and wants photos without significant alteration or heavy use of filters or AI. Photograph the drink you actually hand over, not a styled version of it.
• Weeks two to six, reviews. The neutral request flow, and replies from the owner within days rather than weeks.
• Weeks four to twelve, the habit. Loyalty enrollment mentioned at the counter, a message to guests who have gone quiet, and posts for the spring menu before the iced drinks arrive.

What a monthly report should show a coffee shop

Followers and impressions are easy to grow and say little about your mornings. Ask to see a sample report, and look for:

• Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the listing, month against month.
• Order clicks and app orders, if your system reports them.
• New loyalty members, and how many of them came back within thirty days.
• New reviews, the average rating across the last three months, and replies sent.
• Office or bulk order inquiries, which carry the bigger tickets.

If an agency cannot say where each of those numbers comes from, its report is decoration.

What to do this month

• Open your listing on your phone at opening time and check every line against the door.
• Set special hours for the spring holidays now, even where they will not change.
• Take the review-for-a-free-drink card off the counter and put a neutral line on the receipt instead.
• Count your loyalty members today, so you have a number to compare against in May.
• Photograph your three best sellers in daylight, exactly as served, before the menu turns to iced drinks.
• Write down the questions above and ask them of every agency that calls this spring, including us.

If you would like a second opinion before you sign anything, our page on marketing for cafes and coffee shops lays out the order we work in, and our Google Business Profile work covers the listing setup in more detail. The free plan we write is yours to keep, whichever agency you end up choosing.