Your Google listing decides more than your menu does

Open your own listing and look at the date

Find the last review you replied to. For most restaurants it is months ago, and often it is the angry one — replied to defensively, at length, in a way that reads worse than the review did.

A guest choosing between you and the place next door sees that too. Not the star rating, which is usually similar; the replies, which are usually not.

The four things that are almost always wrong

None of these need an agency. They need twenty minutes and somebody who cares.

• •Hours, especially the ones you changed for a festival and never changed back
• •Photos taken by guests outnumbering photos taken by you, ten to one
• •The category, which decides which searches you appear in at all
• •A menu link that goes to a PDF from two price rises ago

Asking, without becoming a nuisance

The best moment to ask for a review is when the bill is paid and the guest is still happy. Not the next morning, and not to everyone.

The rule that keeps this from turning into spam is simple: ask once, ask the people who came back, and never ask again if they ignored it. A request that arrives on WhatsApp from the number they already ordered from gets answered far more often than an SMS from a number nobody recognises — but only because it is rare.

Replying is the part that compounds

A reply is not for the person who wrote the review. It is for the next forty people who read it while deciding where to eat.

Short, specific, no template. A bad review answered in two honest sentences does more for you than three good reviews nobody responded to — and it is the only part of your listing you fully control.