Restaurant listings before the patios close

Every restaurant we work with has spent the summer of 2020 living off the sidewalk. Patios, parklets, tents, tables in the parking lot, whatever the city would sign off on. It worked better than most owners expected in May.

In a few weeks, in most of the country, it stops working. The tables come in, the volume moves back to pickup and delivery, and the question of who gets the order goes back to whoever answers it fastest in the map results.

That is the listing. So this is the month to get it right, while there is still someone with an hour to spare.

Hours and attributes before the weather turns

The hours field is doing two jobs at once now, and Google gave you the tool to separate them over the summer. “More hours” lets you set distinct hours for pickup, delivery, takeout and drive-through, on top of your main hours.

Work through this list once and you will not have to think about it again until spring:

• Main hours are when a person can walk in or collect. If the kitchen closes before the room does, say so in the pickup hours rather than shaving the main hours.
• Set pickup and delivery hours separately if they differ by even half an hour. This is the single biggest source of the “I drove over and they were closed” review.
• Outdoor seating: leave the attribute on while the patio is open and take it off the week it closes. A listing promising outdoor seating in December earns a one-star review from someone who is cold.
• Dine-in, takeout, delivery and curbside pickup: check everything that is true and nothing that is not. Curbside in particular gets checked optimistically, and then nobody comes out to the car.
• The health and safety attributes Google added over the summer, including mask requirements and whether reservations are needed. These are the things people want settled before they leave the house.
• Holiday hours. Google will prompt you. Fill in Thanksgiving and the days around it now rather than the night before.

Ordering links: yours should be the first one

Third-party ordering links get attached to restaurant listings automatically through the delivery providers’ integrations. Those orders arrive with a commission attached to them.

You can add your own ordering link to the profile and move it up so it is the first thing people tap. Most owners do not know this, and it is the highest-value ten minutes on this page.

While you are in there:

• Add your own order link, then reorder the list so it sits above the marketplaces.
• Open that link on a phone and try to place an order. A lot of the ordering pages we test are unreadable at phone width, and phone width is where nearly every winter order is going to be placed.
• Get the menu onto the profile, either through the menu editor or a menu link, and make sure it is the current menu. A PDF that opens in a new tab and needs pinching is a menu nobody reads.
• Check the phone number rings somewhere a human picks up during pickup hours.

The photos that decide who gets the order

Most restaurant listings we open have a set of dining room photos from a photographer. Those were the right photos before the shutdowns. They are the wrong photos for a winter takeout decision, because they answer a question nobody is asking while dining rooms are closed or half full.

Shoot these on a phone this week:

• The food in the packaging it actually arrives in, on a kitchen table rather than a styled plate.
• The pickup counter, so people know where to stand when they come through the door.
• Where to park for curbside, photographed from the driver’s seat.
• The exterior after dark. It gets dark early from here and people genuinely cannot find doors.
• Staff at the counter in masks, because that is the question half your customers are silently asking.
• Whatever you are doing to stretch the patio into the cold: heaters, a tent, sides on the enclosure.

Recency matters as much as quality. A profile whose newest photo is from summer 2019 reads like a business that never reopened.

Gift cards and the holiday window

Google added a support link for gift cards in spring 2020 and it is still sitting on the profile waiting to be used. If you sell them, put the link there. If you do not sell them online yet, this is the month to fix that, because handing a plastic card across a counter is a much smaller business than it was in December 2019.

Two other things worth doing before the rush:

Use posts for the things with a date on them: the last patio weekend, the winter menu, the cutoff for holiday orders. They expire, so put the refresh on a calendar or it will not happen.

Answer your own questions in Q&A. You can post a question on your own listing and answer it, and it is far better than leaving a stranger to answer “do you still have the patio open?” incorrectly. Write the four questions your staff hear every shift and answer all four today.

What to do this month

• Set separate pickup and delivery hours, and enter holiday hours now while it is quiet.
• Put a date on the calendar for turning the outdoor seating attribute off, and keep it.
• Add your own ordering link and move it above the marketplace links.
• Take ten photos on a phone: packaging, pickup counter, curbside spot, exterior at night.
• Add the gift card link, then place a test order on your own phone from start to finish.
• Reply to every review from the summer before the winter ones start arriving.

The restaurants that got through the summer of 2020 were the ones that made the next step obvious to a stranger holding a phone. Winter is the same job with worse weather and less patience. We handle this as part of our restaurant marketing work, most of it lives on the Google My Business listing you already control, and the reviews you collect over the next three months will be about whether the order was right and whether it was still hot when it got home.