Why you should take control of your Restaurant listings

Posted by danielabriceno on September 17, 2014 in Industry News, Marketing |No Comments

Recently there was an article on The Wire, about a restaurant owner that was suing Google for sabotaging their weekend sales. According to the article, the eatery suffered a 75% drop in customers over weekends in early 2012, and for a long time, the owner could not understand what was going on. Then, a regular diner mentioned that Google Places had listed the restaurant as closed on weekends and Mondays.

Because of this incorrect listing, the restaurant suffered so much that staff had to be laid off and eventually close shop completely by April 2013, about a year after the incorrect listing went up on Google Places.

After the incorrect information was discovered, the owner hired an Internet consultant to adjust and take control of the listing, but it was too late – the damage had already been done.

This unfortunate situation could have been avoided if the restaurant owner had been in control of its restaurants listings on the web. There are many tools nowadays that can simplify the work for you, and help you have consistent and accurate restaurant information on all popular websites and databases.

Moz Local

An example of tool is Moz Local. As their site mentions, they create and maintain business listings on the sites, apps and directories that factor most into local search engine results. Once you upload your location data to Moz Local, it is easy to push your listing to the major data aggregators. The tool can be used to create and update listings, manage location information at any time, re-verify listings and find and resolve duplicate or inconsistent listings.

Where to Get Listed

These are the top 10 websites where your restaurant should be listed:

• Google Places
• Bing Places
• Yahoo! Local Listing
• Yelp
• Yellow Pages
• Citysearch
• Local.com
• Foursquare
• Facebook
• Urbanspoon

The Big Picture

The amount of websites for business listings keeps increasing almost daily, and it is becoming very challenging for restaurant owners to keep track of their listings without using a tool like Moz Local or hiring a marketing consultant. Some of these websites get their information from other databases, without the restaurant’s consent, and the accuracy of the data is never verified which leads to listing inconsistencies. The ideal solution for this problem would be to have a universal database for business location data, where all web listings could get their information.