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IT’S TIME TO PUT YOUR CAFÉ ON THE MAP!
Let´s begin: if I asked you about the online presence of your café, what would be your answer? Do you have an Instagram account? Do you have a website? And what do your customers find when they google your cafe’s name?
Of course social media these days is very important, I would say essential for any business, but there is something that shows even more results: to be found in Google search.
And why is that? Because google is the place where people seek information about everything, specially when they want to find a new place to visit.
You have to put your café on the map, literally!
If you are still not convinced, let’s talk numbers.
According to think with google[1]:
– 88% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a related store within a week;
– 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day;
– 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase;
– People visit 1.5 billion destinations every month related to their google searches;
– Mobile makes 84% of all “near me” searches;
– 36% of travellers would likely pay more for services if a travel brand tailored its information and trip experiences to personal preferences or past behaviour.
This shows the importance of online presence on google for your cafe.
About your cafe, are you registered on Google Search?
Do this exercise: put your cafe’s name on google search. What was the result? Have your café appeared in the top three results or not? Does the photos represent you well? Is the description correct? And also, how do your competitors look?
This exercise is good for understanding how customers are seeing your business. If you study, you can improve and use that to your advantage.
Step By step: what do I need to do to put it into practice?
1. Claim ownership
The first thing to do is to claim your listing on google. If it´s unclaimed, then you have to search for your café by name and you will find “Own this business?” link that will allow contact with google to verify that you are the owner.
If your café for some reason doesn’t appear you can start from scratch at “Google My Business” [2]account.
The interest of google is to sell ads specifically for you, so you can test with a small budget to begin, maybe try some more investment in a bigger campaign or a more organic engagement without using ads. The same thing goes for Waze maps ad that you pay an amount to be inserted on the map.
2. Get Ready
Once you´re verified as the owner by Google you have to organize all information to let your page complete such as: business name, phone number, address, hours, website and Instagram.
Also, it´s very important to put attributes of your café, such as types of coffees, breakfast, brunch, lunch, outdoor seating, events, well, pretty much everything you offer.
3. Next step: Photos!!!
Well, remembering the popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words you have to have good photos of your café, quality photos of the interior and exterior, photos of your menu and some photos of your items that will convince your costumer.
4. Last part: stay tuned for reviews
There are used to rank businesses, which means that the numbers of reviews and how you will answer are important, so always respond, bad and good reviews.
Online presence is a strategy
Being on google search is necessary but we would like to remind you that it is part of a larger strategy, to be present online on several fronts, creating more credibility for your café.
With horizontal integration between existing platforms, such as the production of relevant content on social networks, websites, e-commerce, food apps, and of course other sites such as yelp and TripAdvisor.
[1] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/local-search-to-store-visit-statistics/
[2] https://www.google.com/intl/en_au/business/