Most venue owners have the same experience with Google. Search your own name and you're right there at the top. Search "best Thai in Richmond" and you've vanished.
That isn't bad luck, and it usually isn't your website being ugly. Those are two completely different searches, and the second one is the only one that brings you people who've never heard of you.
This guide covers what genuinely affects whether you turn up in that second search, roughly in the order worth fixing. No jargon, and nothing that needs a developer for the first half.
1. The three places you can show up
When someone searches for somewhere to eat, there are three distinct slots, and they work differently:
- The map pack. The little block of three businesses with a map, usually right at the top. For "restaurant near me" style searches this is where most of the clicks go, and it's driven almost entirely by your Google Business Profile rather than your website.
- The normal blue links. Below the map. This is where guides, review sites and your own pages compete. Slower to win, but it's where searches like "best gluten free brunch Melbourne" get answered.
- AI answers. Google increasingly writes a summary at the top, pulled from pages it already trusts. You don't optimise for this directly; you get quoted in it by being in the other two.
If you only have energy for one, make it the map pack. It's the fastest to move and it's where the intent is strongest, because someone searching that way is usually deciding within the hour.
2. What actually moves the needle
Google doesn't publish its local algorithm, but practitioners run annual surveys that give a reasonable picture of the weighting. The 2026 numbers land roughly here:
| Signal group | What it means | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Categories, hours, photos, posts | ~32% |
| On-page | Your own website's content and structure | ~19% |
| Reviews | Rating, recency, responses | ~16% |
| Links | Other sites linking to you | ~15% |
| Behavioural | Clicks, direction requests, photo views | ~8% |
| Citations | Directory listings with your details | ~7% |
Treat these as directional rather than exact. They come from industry surveys of local SEO practitioners, not from Google, and they shift year to year.
The useful takeaway is the first row. Roughly a third of local ranking sits in a free tool most venues fill in once and never touch again. That's where the cheapest wins are.
3. Your Google Business Profile does most of the work
If your profile is unclaimed, claim it today. Everything below assumes you have access.
Primary category is the single biggest lever
This one field is consistently identified as the strongest individual factor for map pack ranking. Not "Restaurant" if something more specific fits. A place doing Thai should be Thai restaurant, not Asian restaurant. A cafe doing serious brunch should think hard about whether it's a cafe, a brunch restaurant or a breakfast restaurant, because those pull different searches.
Add secondary categories for what you genuinely also are, but be honest. Stuffing categories you don't fit tends to hurt.
Your hours have to be right
Whether you're open at the moment someone searches has become one of the strongest factors. Closed venues get pushed down for "open now" searches, which is a large share of restaurant traffic. Public holidays are where most venues slip up, and Melbourne has plenty of them.
Photos, regularly
Fresh photos help twice: they feed the profile directly, and they drive the engagement signals below. Food, interior, exterior so people can find the door. Add them on an ongoing basis rather than uploading forty once.
Posts and engagement
Profile posts (specials, events, a new menu) are worth doing a couple of times a week. They matter less on their own than for what they trigger: clicks, photo views and direction requests are now weighted meaningfully, and a profile that people interact with outranks one that just sits there.
4. Reviews: velocity beats volume
The common belief is that you need hundreds of reviews. What matters more is a steady recent flow. Forty reviews with the newest from last week beats four hundred where the newest is from 2023.
- Aim for a consistent trickle rather than occasional bursts. A handful a month is genuinely useful.
- Reply to everything, quickly. Within a couple of days. Response rate and speed are both read as signals, and it visibly matters to people reading.
- Reply properly to bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a two-star review does more for a browsing customer than the review costs you.
- Never buy reviews. Detection is good, penalties are severe, and in Australia it also breaches consumer law.
The words customers use matter too. If people naturally write "best pho in Footscray", that phrasing helps you rank for it. You can't script that, but you can prompt honestly: ask what they had, not what to say.
5. Get your details identical everywhere
Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number across your site and every directory it can find. Mismatches read as uncertainty about whether you're a real, single business, and that suppresses rankings.
The usual culprits are boring: "Street" on one listing and "St" on another, an old phone number on a directory you forgot about, a suite number that appears sometimes. Pick one exact format and make everything match it. Your own website, Google, the delivery platforms, TripAdvisor, whatever local directories list you.
6. Your website probably isn't doing its job
Most venue websites are a homepage, a gallery, and a menu. That's enough for someone who already knows your name, and close to useless for everyone else.
- A menu as a PDF or an image is invisible. Search engines can't reliably read it, so every dish name you serve is missing from the web. Menus should be real text on a page.
- You need words that match how people search. If nothing on your site says "gluten free" and half your kitchen is gluten free, you can't turn up for it.
- One page per real thing you offer. Function bookings, set menus, the bottomless brunch. These are separate searches and they deserve separate pages.
- Add Restaurant structured data. This is markup that states your address, hours, price range and cuisine in a format search engines read directly. It's a developer job, but a small one.
The venue name trap
Almost every venue website is optimised for its own name, which is the one search where you'd have won anyway. Someone typing your name has already decided. The searches worth competing for are the ones where they haven't: cuisine, suburb, occasion, dietary need.
7. What others say counts more than what you say
Links from other sites are around 15% of the picture, and they're the hardest thing to fake. Google treats a mention on a site it already trusts as third-party evidence you're real and worth showing.
Realistic sources for a Melbourne venue:
- Local press and guides. Broadsheet, Time Out, Concrete Playground, suburb-specific blogs. A new menu or a genuine story is your way in.
- Food guides and roundups that cover your area or your niche.
- Suppliers and neighbours. Your roaster, your baker, the local trader association. These links are easy and most venues never ask.
- Anyone who writes about you. If someone covers you, ask them to link rather than just name you. A mention without a link does very little.
This is the slowest part and the one that compounds. It's also the reason a venue with a mediocre website sometimes outranks a beautiful one.
8. The order to do this in
Start here
- Claim your Google Business Profile if you haven't.
- Fix your primary category. Be as specific as is honest.
- Correct your hours, including every public holiday for the next year.
- Add current photos, and set a reminder to add more monthly.
- Reply to every review you've ever received that's still unanswered.
- Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear.
- Get your menu onto the page as real text, not a PDF.
- Write one page for each distinct thing you want to be found for.
- Ask three people who already write about you for a link.
The first six are free and can be done in an afternoon by anyone with the logins. The last three are where most venues stall, because they need either a web person or someone to do the asking.
The short version
Ranking for your own name is not the same as being found. The searches that bring you strangers are about cuisine, suburb and occasion, and almost no venue website answers them. Fix your Google Business Profile first because it's a third of the weighting and it's free, keep reviews flowing, then work on having real pages and real third-party coverage.
None of this is fast. Local rankings move over weeks and months, not days, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
Where RealEats fits
Point 9 is the one venues find hardest, and it's part of what we do. When one of our creators visits, we publish a write-up on our Melbourne food guide, built around the searches that suit your venue rather than just your name. You get the social content and a page that keeps working after it.
We can't promise you a particular ranking, and nobody honestly can. See how it works.
If you're weighing up creator marketing alongside this, we've also written about what working with food creators actually involves and how to find Melbourne creators without agency fees.