A couple of surprises have popped up in the last few weeks that affect what consumers see when searching for a restaurant on Google. Both of them have me hurting in my heart for local businesses. I wish Google would just leave the search result display alone. Restaurant management has a hard enough time just trying to keep customers coming back, and then Google comes along and disrupts how owners attract new customers.
Menu Listings and Company Info
When Googling a company name and "menu", like "Pat's BBQ menu", Google now breaks out menu items in the results. that would seem nice, right?
However, the prices are wrong.
Google, the best place to get the menu items and prices for a restaurant is the restaurant's website. So why not just make it the top search result and not try to be so smart?
I understand that Google is trying to be helpful and present information to visitors. Restaurant owners are not going to take the effort to create a special formatted file just for Google that will have all the items and the current prices and keep it up to date. Oh, that's right - they already do. It's called a web page. They already have it on their own website. Why not just have it as the result?
And don't use the excuse that it's pulled from the menu page anyway. What if the restaurant's menu page features a limited-time coupon, or lunch specials, or has a service charge? There are many cases where what you are showing is not the whole story. Let the restaurant present the menu its own way, with its own branding and style. It knows what's best for itself.
Searching for information about a specific business that exists on that business' website should simply have the page on that website as the first result. Period.
Thanks to the gents at eWebStyle in Houston, TX for alerting us to this on this recent podcast. They have an informative (and very fun) podcast that restaurants will find extremely useful.
If the player doesn't show above, you can watch over here.
They found through their restaurant clients that the information in the menu listings was incorrect, and were working with Google to determine the source of these items. They found the listings come from a site called Locu.com. They are working with Google and attempting to determine if deleting the restaurant's profile on Locu.com will scrub the result from Google. Hopefully it will.
The Number of Top Local Results
When searching for "bbq Salt Lake City", you get 3 recommended results based on reviews, before Google displays the normal search index results. This used to be 7. For a long time. It was called the "7 pack", and SEOs and marketers worked hard to get customers into that top 7. Now it's only 3 and much harder. Not everyone can be in the top 3, but with 7 at least you had a chance to pop in.
Google, I wish you would just remove this block. If people want to find reviews of businesses, they can search for "bbq Salt Lake City reviews" and get it.
There is real danger in being complacent when it comes to rankings in Google. Just because you have a spot there now does not mean you can stop optimization efforts for local SEO, especially since your competitors will be ramping it up.
Google, don't get me wrong, you're great, but restaurateurs and small business owners should not have to view Google as their competition, something they have to beat.
Help, don't harm.