Your Google profile sells more than your feed does

There is a page about your business that you almost certainly do not maintain, that appears above your website in search, and that decides whether a stranger three kilometres away drives to you. It is your Google Business Profile, and for most venues it is the single most neglected asset they own.

Photos are not decoration, they are directions

Businesses with photos on their profile get around 42% more direction requests on Google Maps. Not more views — more people actually navigating to the door. Google also rewards freshness, so a profile that gets ten to fifteen new food and interior photos a month outperforms one loaded up once in 2023 and forgotten.

If you are already paying for a monthly shoot, this costs nothing extra. The selects are sitting in a folder. They belong on Maps too.

Volume of reviews beats perfection

A venue with 150 reviews at 4.3 stars will generally out-rank one with 20 reviews at 4.8. Chasing a perfect score is the wrong game; steady collection is the right one. QR codes on tables, a line on the receipt, a request after a delivery order. And reply to everything, especially the bad ones — Google reads response behaviour as a sign the business is alive.

Put the menu in text, not a PDF

This one is almost universal in Jakarta and almost always wrong. A menu uploaded as a PDF or a JPEG is close to invisible: Google can barely read it, and voice assistants cannot read it at all. As plain text on your site, the same menu starts ranking for individual dish searches — which is how people actually search when they are hungry.

AI answers are built from all of it

When someone asks an AI assistant where to eat, the answer is assembled from business profiles, site content, reviews and structured data. Venues that keep all four current get recommended. Venues that keep none of them current do not appear at all — not because they ranked badly, but because there was nothing to cite.

The honest summary

Your feed builds desire. Your profile captures it. Running one without the other is paying for demand and then letting it leak.