Your Google Business Profile, done properly.

Somebody hungry within a mile of you searches on a phone. What they see first is not your website. It is a map pack of three businesses with a photo, a star rating and a button. Most of the decision happens there, before anybody clicks through to anything. The profile is the shopfront now, and unlike your website it costs nothing and Google fills the traffic in for you.

Your primary category is the biggest single lever on the profile and the one most often wrong. Google matches searches to it heavily, so a curry house filed under "Restaurant" instead of "Indian restaurant" quietly loses every "indian near me" search in the area. Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes you, then add secondary categories for the rest.

Wrong hours are worse than no hours, because somebody walks to a closed door and leaves a one-star review about it. Set your normal week, then set the special hours for bank holidays, Christmas and any week you close. Google prompts you for these and most owners dismiss the prompt. If you do delivery until later than you do collection, say so in the more-hours fields rather than leaving people to guess.

There are two link fields worth arguing about: the order link and the menu link. If you leave the order link empty, Google will often populate it with whatever marketplace has an integration, which means a search for your name by name ends with you paying commission on a customer who was already yours. Point the order link at your own ordering page and the menu link at your own menu.

Profiles with recent photography get looked at longer, and the food photos people actually want are the ones that look like what arrives, not styled stock. Aim for twenty or more, refreshed a few times a year. Cover the food, the room, the front of the building so people can find the door, and the team if they are willing. Here is the honest limit: photos help you convert the people who already found you. They do not much help you get found in the first place. Fix the category before you book a photographer.

Reply to everything, good and bad, within a few days. Two reasons. The obvious one is that a considered reply to a bad review reads better to the next person than the review itself. The less obvious one is that review volume and freshness feed local ranking, and a profile with active replies signals a business that is still trading. Keep the replies short and specific. A copy-pasted reply on twenty reviews looks exactly like what it is.