Booking from Google: the free route most venues miss

When a guest searches for a restaurant by name, or for somewhere to eat nearby, the first thing they usually see is not the restaurant's website. It is the restaurant's Google Business Profile: the panel or map listing with photos, reviews, opening hours, the menu and, if the venue has set it up, a way to book. For many guests, that panel is where the decision is made and where the booking should happen.

Booking from Google is one of the cheapest channels a venue has. The profile is free, the booking link on it is free, and guests who find you on Google are often close to deciding. Yet many venues leave the booking link empty, point it at the home page, or assume that because they have no special integration, there is nothing to set up. That leaves bookings on the table, or sends them to a platform that charges for them.

This guide explains the two ways guests can book from Google, how to set up the one every venue can use, what Google's own booking button requires, and how to make the path from profile to booking as short as possible. Every figure in it is an example.

For a restaurant, the Google Business Profile is often the real home page. It appears in search results and on Google Maps, it shows the things guests care about most, such as photos, reviews, hours and price, and it is where guests on phones look first. Our guide to your Google Business Profile as the real homepage covers the profile as a whole.

A guest who sees the profile and wants to book should be able to do it from there. If the profile has no booking link, the guest has to click through to the website, find the booking page and start again. Some will. Many will choose another venue whose profile let them book in two taps.

There are two quite different things that can appear on a profile.

The first is a booking link: a link, added by the venue, that opens the venue's own booking page. Any venue can add one, it costs nothing, and it works with any booking page. The guest taps the link, the booking page opens, and they book there.

The second is Google's own booking button: a button that lets the guest book without leaving Google, through an integration between Google and a booking provider. Google's help pages describe this as setting up bookings through a provider, and it depends on the provider taking part in Google's programme. Google's guidance on managing your business links explains that a booking link added by hand does not create that button.

Most venues should start with the first, because it is free, quick and entirely under their control.

Adding a booking link takes a few minutes. Sign in to your Business Profile, open the profile editor, and look for the section for booking links. Google's own help explains the current steps, and the menu names change from time to time, so follow its instructions rather than an old screenshot. Paste in the address of your booking page, save, and allow some time for the change to appear.

Three things make the link work well:

Google's own booking button is attractive because the guest never leaves Google. It works through booking providers that have built an integration with Google, under what Google calls its partner programmes, described in its Actions Center documentation. Google's help page on setting up bookings through a provider explains how venues connect a provider that takes part.

If your booking provider takes part, the button may appear once your venue is connected. If it does not, you cannot add the button yourself, but the booking link still works. For most independent venues, a well-placed booking link to a fast booking page converts guests perfectly well; the difference is one extra page load.

Be careful with booking buttons supplied by platforms that charge per cover. A button that sends guests through a marketplace can be convenient, but every booking it takes may carry a fee, and the guest relationship may sit partly with the platform. Our guide to booking platforms and what you rent and own covers that trade.

The booking link is one of several links on the profile, and the others affect whether guests get as far as booking.

A profile that answers a guest's questions about the place, the food and the price makes the booking link the obvious next step.

Local SEO is the work of making a venue appear when people search nearby or for its kind of food. Much of it happens on the profile: the right categories, a complete description, accurate hours, good photos, steady reviews and replies to them. Our guide to local SEO for a restaurant in plain terms covers it in detail.

The booking link does not directly make a profile rank higher, but it changes what happens after the profile is seen. A profile that appears in search and lets guests book in two taps turns visibility into covers. One that appears and sends guests hunting for a booking page wastes the visibility it earned.

Google's profile insights show how many people viewed your profile and how many tapped particular links, including bookings and the website. Your booking system shows how many bookings were made. Comparing the two gives a rough booking conversion rate for guests arriving from Google.

As an invented example, if 400 people tap the booking link in a month and 120 complete a booking, the conversion from tap to booking is 30 per cent. If it is much lower, look at the path: where does the link go, how quickly does the page load on a phone, how long is the form, and were there times available for the dates people wanted? Our guide to booking conversion from page view to confirmed explains how to find where guests drop out.

Guests arriving from Google are mostly on phones, often looking for a table soon: tonight, tomorrow, this weekend. The booking page they land on needs to handle that well.

Our guide to mobile booking covers designing the flow for a phone in more detail.

Some of the most damaging profile errors are temporary ones. A venue closed for a holiday whose profile still says open sends guests to a locked door, and a few of them will leave a review saying so. A venue opening late for an event whose profile shows normal hours turns away guests who would have come.

Use the profile's special hours for every holiday, closure and change, well in advance, and check them the week before. If you are running an event with limited availability, say so on the profile and on the booking page, so guests who arrive from Google know what to expect before they tap.

Guests on Google often decide before they reach your booking page. They look at the photos, the price indicator, the reviews, the hours and sometimes the menu, and only then tap the booking link. The booking link converts best when everything above it has already answered the guest's questions.

Look at your profile the way a stranger would, on a phone. Do the first photos show the food and the room as they really are? Is it clear what kind of place this is and roughly what it costs? Are the latest reviews recent? Is the booking link easy to find? If a stranger would hesitate at any of these, fix that first, because a guest who hesitates on the profile rarely reaches the booking page.

Because booking from Google is free, it is easy to underestimate. Think instead about what a missing or broken link costs. As an invented example, if 300 guests a month tap through to book from the profile and a broken link loses half of them, that is 150 bookings, and at an average spend of 40 a head with two guests a booking, about 12,000 of sales a month that went somewhere else.

Even if the real figure is a fraction of that, it is far more than the five minutes a month it takes to check the link. Few marketing activities have a return as clear as making sure the booking link on your profile works.

Many guests find restaurants on Google Maps rather than in search results, especially when they are already out: walking around a neighbourhood, looking at what is nearby, deciding where to eat in the next hour. The same Business Profile appears in Maps, with the same booking link, hours and photos.

Guests on Maps are often the most ready to book, because they want somewhere soon. That makes two details especially important: your hours must be accurate for today, and your booking page must show availability for tonight clearly, including the next free times if the one they want is taken. A guest standing in the street who sees a table free in forty minutes will often book it; one who sees an empty screen walks on to the next venue on the map.

Check your pin too. A pin placed slightly wrong sends guests to the wrong door, or makes the venue look further away than it is. Our guide to local SEO for a restaurant covers the profile details that affect how you appear on the map.

A group with several venues should have one Business Profile per venue, each with its own address, hours, photos and booking link pointing at that venue's booking page. A single profile for a group, or several profiles all linking to one page that asks guests to choose a venue, adds a step and confuses guests who have already chosen.

Keep the details consistent across profiles: the same style of description, the same naming, the same approach to photos. Assign someone to check each profile every month, because a group's profiles drift apart quickly when nobody owns them.

A booking link that worked last year may not work now. Websites are rebuilt, booking systems change, and links break quietly. Put a monthly check in the diary:

It takes five minutes, and it is the cheapest protection a venue has against losing bookings from its most valuable free channel.

Reviews sit next to the booking link, and guests read them before they tap it. A steady stream of recent reviews, with replies from the venue to both praise and complaints, makes a profile more convincing. A profile whose latest review is a year old, or whose complaints go unanswered, makes guests hesitate.

Ask happy guests to leave a review, without offering anything in return, and reply to every review in a sentence or two. Replies to complaints matter most, because future guests read them to judge how the venue treats people. A calm, specific reply often reassures more than a perfect rating.

An invented neighbourhood restaurant appears well in local search but takes most of its online bookings through a marketplace that charges per cover. Its Business Profile has no booking link of its own; guests who want to book from Google tap the website link, land on the home page and often give up or book through the marketplace instead.

The restaurant adds a booking link to its own booking page, replaces its menu PDF with a live menu page, corrects its holiday hours and starts replying to reviews. Over the following months, more of its online bookings come through its own booking page and fewer through the marketplace, by its own count of booking sources. With a per-cover fee of an example 2.50 and a few hundred covers a month moving across, the saving is several hundred a month, for an afternoon's work. Our guide to commission-free bookings works through the arithmetic.

servearound does not manage your Google Business Profile, and it does not provide Google's own booking button. What it gives the profile is the two links guests use most. Each venue has its own booking page, in your colours with your logo and photographs, built to work on a phone, so the profile's booking link can open it directly and guests can book from their phone and get their confirmation by email. The menu is a live page rather than a PDF, so the profile's menu link always shows the current menu.

When a venue publishes them, its booking page and menu can be found by search engines, and Analytics shows bookings by source, such as the booking page, the widget on your own website, phone and walk-in. See the reservations module and Campaigns.

Add a booking link to your Google Business Profile that opens your own booking page. It is free and works with any booking page. Google's own booking button requires a booking provider that takes part in Google's programme.

The profile and the booking link are free. Some booking providers and platforms charge for the bookings they take, including those that arrive through Google.

The button depends on a booking provider integrated with Google. A booking link added by hand does not create it, but it still lets guests book.

Straight to the booking page for that venue, where guests choose a date, time and party size. Not to the home page.

Not directly. It turns the visibility your profile earns into bookings, which is what the visibility is for.

Monthly: search for the venue on a phone, test the booking and menu links, and check the hours, especially before holidays.

Yes, with its own address, hours, photos and booking link to that venue's booking page.

Guests read them before tapping the booking link. Recent reviews and calm, specific replies make a profile more convincing.

Changes to a profile can take a little while to show, sometimes a day or more. Check the profile on a phone after a couple of days, and test the link once it appears.

Google lets you add booking links and mark one as preferred. Keep it simple: one link, to your own booking page, is clearer for guests than several.

Yes. Many guests check the menu before booking, so a live menu page alongside the booking link helps them decide and book in one visit.

Add your own booking link so guests have a direct route, and compare the cost of marketplace bookings with bookings on your own page.

Booking from Google is one of the cheapest channels a venue has, because guests often decide on the Google Business Profile itself. Add a booking link to your profile that opens your own booking page directly, give each venue its own profile and link, replace menu PDFs with a live menu page, keep hours correct and reply to reviews.

Google's own booking button needs a booking provider integrated with Google; without it, the booking link still works with one extra page. Test the link on a phone every month, compare profile taps with bookings to see your booking conversion, and fix the path before anything else. Most venues that set this up properly take more bookings directly and pay less for them.