Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Three weeks ago, I attended an invite only Restaurant Influencer event at the Google headquarters here in New York City. When I got the invite through a friend, I thought there'd be like, I don't know, 200, 300, like, like notable restaurant people in that room. It wasn't. I was one of 27 people. And Google, Google blew it out that day. Brought in all these heads of product for Google. You know, the Google business profile for paid ads, for, for YouTube, for YouTube shorts, for local search. I mean, all these people, and they literally sat there, number one, treated us a little bit like a focus group. So they asked us our opinion on things that they were, that they were working on. By the way, I had to sign an NDA. So there's a bunch of stuff I learned that day that I can't share with you.
But then the rest of the day is they told us what they built, how they intended it to be used, the best way to get the most out of the Google platform. And I left with my head spinning. This episode, I'm going to share all of the things I can share with you about what I learned that day at Google. And I promise you, if you just put five of these into, into play, it's going to change your business in profound ways in the next 60 days. All of that, my day, and the insights that my takeaways from this Google influencer event. On today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week, I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build a more profitable restaurant. This. These episodes are absolutely free, right? Two new episodes every single week. All I ask for you in return is that if you get any sort of value, take two minutes and go. Leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. 5 stars. Let people know what you've gotten out of the show, why you listen, and why you think they should listen. That more than anything else would help this my small business.
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Okay, so we're talking about this event that I had the, the great privilege to attend at the Google headquarters in New York City. Brand new building, way over on the west side down in Soho. Again, it was a restaurant influencer event. I thought to be a couple hundred people. There were 27 of us in the room and they had like a dozen product managers, you know, like not just anybody there, but like the people in charge of these massive products that you and I both know, like local search, like YouTube, like Google Business profile and on and on and on. They used us as a focus group. They asked us questions, they asked us to weigh in on some of the stuff that they were building. And then they showed us, right, really pulled back the curtain and showed us what they built, how they intended it to be used, the best ways to get, get that, get the most out of the Google platform. So what I want to do in today's episode, short and sweet, I want to share with you my biggest takeaways from that day. I mean, they brought us in. You literally can't walk 15ft without having food or coffee or tea or something being shoved in your face. They're incredibly hospitable. The spaces are beautiful and comfortable. The, the meeting room, the presentation room was, was next level. Everything you've heard about being in a Google building was absolutely, was absolutely true. It is a really special place to be. Here are my biggest takeaways from that event. The first one is that Google is the most important website for your business next to your website, right? So your restaurant, your brick and mortar building, right, Is the most important place. Next is your website. After that is Google. It is that important? More important than Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Yelp? Way more important. Because on Google there is incredible purchase intent. People show up looking for something. They want a solution to their problem, right? They go to YouTube to figure out the answers to something, to figure out how to do something, they go to Google to find something. It is a search engine, right? So when people want to go find things, they go to Google. Your job as a restaurant owner, as a business owner is to be found by the people who are looking for the thing you have. So if you have the best Smash burgers in midtown, then you want to make sure that the people who are in midtown looking for great Smash burgers find find you. It's as simple as that. Whatever it is you serve, you want to be found by the people who are looking for that thing. There is incredible purchase intent. There was a couple statistics that they shared, right? Like 90% of users who do it who run a near me search in Google end up visiting one of those businesses within 60 minutes. It was the first thing like blew my mind. Here's the second statistic that blew my mind. Did you know that 50%. So half of the people who click the get directions button end up visiting that business within the next 60 minutes, right? Near me searches and get directions are incredibly powerful and we need to optimize for those two things because if you can get somebody to click get directions, you know, half of them are coming to your restaurant, right? If they type a near me search and you pop up in that near me search, best tacos, near me, best sushi, near me, best Greek food near me, there's a very good probability that they will visit you if you are found at the top of that search.
Those are incredibly powerful that can influence your business in profound ways. That was my first takeaway those two pieces of information.
Next thing is, they said near me searches have nearly doubled over the last year, right? So literally Greek, near me tacos, near me, best sushi, near me, et cetera, et cetera. They've nearly doubled in the last year. Near me searches run in Spanish have seen almost a thousand percent increase this year as opposed to last year. That's incredible. That represents an incredible opportunity to target your keywords. But in Spanish, especially if you're in an area that has a, you know, meaningful population of Spanish speakers, like that's a no brainer, you will just make more money because they are not typing in necessarily the English words, they're typing in the Spanish words, right?
Almost 1000% increase in Spanish. One of the things that got hammered home to us is the important of the importance of your Google my business profile. So the, the, the Google my business or the Google business profile, right, is, is where you store all of your information, making sure that your name, address, phone number, hours and menu are current is absolutely crucial. And that those things match your website, those things match everything else on the Internet. Now there are listings management tools like Marquee, M A R Q I I. If you're not already using it, that's an incredibly powerful tool that you can use to manage your listings. But at the very least, even if you do it manually by hand, you need to make sure that your listings match in the most important spots across the Internet. So Google, BIM, Bing, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, whatever else matters to your business. Crucial and really, you should be buttoning up all of those. And that's what a listings management tool like Marquee can do for you. But it's absolutely crucial. That was pounded, pounded, pounded into us. I got more takeaways I'm going to share with you just a second after a word from another one of our sponsors Now. Sterling Douglas is the co founder and CEO of a company called Chowley. Chowley does so much for this industry. And I want you to hear a little bit from Sterling.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: In the last few years, restaurants have faced massive changes. Labor costs, food costs, rent, even payment processing costs are up so much that price increases alone can't cover it. And at the same time, their customers are demanding a whole new way to interact digitally. And that's now a requirement to survive, let alone thrive. To their credit, restaurant operators have been resilient. They've survived pandemics, inflation, regulatory environments and more. They've added the tablets, put out the QR codes, took reviews seriously, and their reward? A disjointed collection of tech that doesn't talk to each other and is impossible to manage. I've listened to hundreds of operators tell me the same story with the same problems. And that's why we came out with the Chale platform. One place to manage everything outside of your four walls. Just like everything built at Chale for our 17,000 restaurants. Integrations and connections are at the heart of everything we do. It starts with your digital storefront. Your website has two jobs, more traffic, more orders by connecting to Google Business Profile and your point of sale. We get that done for you. Digital marketing. We'll manage your paid ads, emails and social posts. We'll help you win the hyperlocal knife fight to maximize your sales. We measure everything so you know exactly where your orders are coming from. Marketplace, email, website, ads, app, all in one place.
CH gives you more orders by ensuring your entire digital storefront is optimized with the data you already have more time by using our knowledge and a done for you experience and more control by managing it all in one place. The Chowley platform isn't just a tool. It's a partner in running a more successful and profitable restaurant.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: If you want to learn more about Chowley, go find the link in the show notes.
Okay, so I'm sharing my biggest insights and takeaways from my day spent at the Google headquarters here in New York City. I was invited to an invite only restaurant influencer event. I thought it'd be a couple hundred. It was a couple dozen. It was incredible. We literally got to pick the brains of these like, you know, these geniuses who work at Google and build these products that we know, that we know and use and we know the importance of them. But I was able to really like, just get to the bottom and get to understand. So I shared a couple of my biggest insights, my biggest takeaways right at the top. I'm going to share you with you. The rest. One thing that got pounded into us over the course of the day was the importance that reviews now play in search results, right? So they call this now reputation management. Quantity of reviews, the quality of the reviews and the recency of the reviews are crucial, right? So a restaurant that has just as many reviews and just as many five star reviews, right? Two restaurants that are both a 4.5 and a 4.5, one of them will win out if they have more. If they're both 4.5, if one of them has more reviews, like greater volume, Google will weight that more because they're like, well, more people think that things better, right? If they both have a thousand reviews, right? They both have a thousand reviews and they're both 4.5. The one that wins out is the one with more good recent reviews, right? So it tells me that we need a steady stream of great reviews. There's a bunch of ways that we can do this. I've talked about this on the podcast. You can go search out old episodes, you can use my tactic or you can use other tactics. But we need, we need to prioritize capturing, capturing reviews. Here's the next thing that I sort of knew, but I heard them say it is that responding to the reviews actually impacts the, your placement in search results, right? So, and we know this, right? Like if you're in your restaurant and somebody says, oh my God, this was so great. You don't just walk away. What are you going to do? You're going to say, thank you. Thanks so much. I'm so glad you enjoyed it, it's the same thing with your digital presence online. You need to acknowledge that and thank them for it, right? So when someone says, we just had the best meal ever, this place is incredible, their smash burgers are great, you say, thanks so much. I'm glad you found us. We look forward to taking care of you again, you have to respond to those reviews. Likewise, it also works with the bad reviews. If somebody you know levies a complaint in your restaurant, pull you aside and say, hey, listen, this steak was overcooked. This really, this really wasn't good, you're going to say, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Let me make this right.
It's the same thing digitally. So when you respond to your, with your Google reviews, yeah, you got to respond to the good ones, you got to respond to the bad ones. You also PS have to respond to all the ones in the middle, respond to every single review. So quantity matters, quality matters, recency matters, and whether or not you respond to your reviews matters. All of those things impact your search results. That is incredible. Here was a little hack that I heard numerous times over it, which is that to update your photos pretty, pretty consistently, right? So you can add your own photos. So if users, right, if users can add their user generated content to the Google my business profile. So if they're going to leave a review and post some photos, those will get added. But what you want to do is always be adding your own photos, right? 5, 10, 20 photos every single month. So that, number one, you're pushing some of the, some of the other photos out and your branded photos go front and center. But also it keeps that page alive. It lets Google know that like there is somebody you know curating this, that there's a, there's an engaged operator, there's an engaged owner there. That's really, really crucial.
Running ads ends up being a one, two punch, right? SEM is search engine monetization. So when you run ads on Google, it actually helps your SEO Search Engine optimization, right? So the paid side actually ends up serving the organic side. As I always think, paid Google Ads are the first dollars we should be spending in our business. That was sort of fortified there. One thing, and this is the last thing I'm going to leave you with, is that now you can run a promotion using Google Ads, right? So you can say, you know, click here and get $5 off your next visit or get $10 off your first visit or whatever it is. So you can do something that would get someone to come in and redeem that offer. And if you're trying to focus on customer acquisition, you're trying to put your thumb on the scale and get someone to choose you over somebody else, that is one way to do it. So I don't like the heavy discounts. I don't like all the gimmicks all the time. But offering a promotion to get someone in the front door just seems like a good idea. That's it, guys. Those are my biggest insights and takeaways from my day spent at the Google Restaurant Influencer event. It's here at the headquarters on the west side of Manhattan here in New York City. I learned a ton. Again, there's a bunch of that I can't even share with you yet. When, when they release features, I'm happy to talk to you about what I learned regarding those features. This is the stuff that I can talk to you about and this is like blocking and tackling. This is the, the, the stuff that actually will make a difference in your business. As always, guys, appreciate you taking time out of your day to be here. One final request, if you get any sort of value out of the show, please take two minutes. Go leave us a five star rating and review. Hey look reputation management. Go leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. That helps move the needle, helps grow our community. That more than anything else would help me immensely. I appreciate it. Hope you get something out of these episodes every single week. I appreciate being here. I will see you next time.
