Market Your Restaurant Events and Specials with Google My Business

A Summer Surprise from Google was revealed this week. As Google continues to leverage their local business capabilities, restaurants like yours get more and more ways to attract new customers and engage with existing customers.  The ease of taking advantage of ways to market your restaurant events and special offers has increased with Google’s most recent feature update to Google My Business.

Google My Business Now Allows Restaurants to Post Directly Into Their Listing Results

Now restaurants can post information through their My Business verified listing and have it display in their rich data (structured data) information card in the Google search results.  The example in this photo is of our first post to our brand page.  A local restaurant can get even more creative and may wish to leverage this feature often to keep search results fresh and new. These search result types are especially appealing when viewed on a mobile device or Google Maps (as seen in these photos)

One of the neat parts about this new GMB capability is that you can create Events as well.  When you create an event through this post you can include:

1. Start Date – A day that your event starts
2. Start Time – A time that your event starts
3. End Date – A day your event ends. This could be a long offer/promo period or seasonal menu offering.  Just remember, it doesn’t have to be a 1 day event to post!
4. End Time – A time that your event ends.

Along with those capabilities all posts are able to be have a button/link to a landing page of your choice.  The link text/titles you can choose from are

• Reserve
• Sign Up
• Buy
• Get Offer

With that kind of flexibility it’s easy to let your mind wander and get creative about some of the types of posts you could put out there for users to interact with.

Does posting to my GMB listing help my search rankings?

This functionality became available to everyone only this week.  That means there just has not been enough time to monitor the impact of posting vs not posting or how much posting should be done, etc.  There are plenty of questions that still need to be answered about this new feature.  We’re excited to find out if this will be an effective way to put your restaurant ahead of the game when taken advantage of in terms of SEO.

Regardless of it’s direct SEO impact you should never forget that a big part of search engine optimization is “ease of use” and “accessibility” for your customers.  Those concepts are the glue that bind search traffic/ranking to sales. You must be able to let your potential customers convert into captured customers as easily as possible.  The features that exist with the GMB posting at launch are clearly great for doing this.  You are able to get your restaurant’s most important message out to all customers via your My Business listing easily and instantly now.

Will Online Restaurant Manager Help with This?

YES! We are looking to help facilitate YOUR ease of use in posting to your Google My Business listings in a the following ways:

1. We make sure your business is verified, claimed, and optimized in GMB
2. We sync your GMB listing information to our dashboard
3. We give you the ability to click into your GMB listing on Google to post quickly
   1. NOTE: we are working to make this native to our dashboard as Google permits
4. We allow you to submit a request to our team to implement a post on your behalf

Basically, our tools allow you to access all your GMB information quickly and easily from one location to write posts on your own while making ourselves available to post on your behalf on request.

We look forward to seeing what else Google has in their plans but it’s clear to us that they are making their Google My Business platform better and better for local restaurant owners… something that makes us very excited for the future!