Introduction:

I’m with good friend Michael Thibault in New Orleans. I was teaching a course on increasing profits to bowling center owners and Michael Thibault was teaching a course on marketing, more specifically “Reputation Management”. Some of you have been through the webinar that we did together, if not, here’s a link to the webinar.

Today we’re going to share what will become your number one restaurant marketing tip.

What’s Michael Thibault’s #1 Restaurant marketing tip?

Michael: It’s hands down Google! If you own a restaurant make sure you claim and optimize your Google business listing. You can’t answer reviews, you can’t do anything until you claim that. I always get the question, “Mike, what do you mean by optimizing?” I mean optimizing a listing – make sure you upload photos, fill in your hours, etc.. If you’re open on Monday and Google thinks you’re closed that’s kind of hurting your business, so you want to make sure all that information is correct. Tick as many boxes as you can and fill out as many descriptions as you can. I want you to think “Google, Google, Google” for your restaurant.

How to claim your Google site:

Michael: The best answer is to Google it! You can google “My Business Listing” to walk you through the entire process. If you need help or you want somebody to help you with your Online Reputation Management you can get the link here or on https://dfymarketingsystems.com. We can walk you through the process and help you out and take care of all of it for you.

Ryan: We’ve been working together for a couple of years now. Michael and I do the no peeking red envelope promotion that was just finished that with great success. Michael’s a recovering restaurant owner so he knows the business.

What is claiming?

“Claiming” is when Google creates a listing for you no matter what, whether you want it or not, and it’s probably not going to have the right information on there. What you need to do is “claim” it. Then Google will know that you’re the owner and you can edit the listing. Google will also legitimize it and then you can go in and correct the information (your address for example).

Search engines are smart, but they’re also dumb at the same time. What I mean by that is your address may have St. whereas on Yelp it’s Street. It’s going to be hard for Google to know that it’s the same restaurant. Part of this “claiming process” is also cleaning up your listings. It’s one of the services DFY can do for you if you don’t want to do it yourself.

Google, it’s your online real estate – claim it! Thanks to Michael Thibault have a great one!