A new report has come out that menu items and busy times in Google Maps are both ranking factors and signals in Google's local ranking system. Claudia Tomina posted the details on her blog and told me that she's tested this with a number of businesses. Claudia also personally sent me some examples where she was able to reproduce this over and over again.
Claudia Tomina found that adding a menu item to a Google Business Profile boosted the business's ranking for users who searched for that item. In the example provided, replacing “Caesar Kitchen” with “Caesar Salad” on the menu helped the business profile go from ranking 71st on June 7th to ranking #1 on the 8th.
She told me she had repeated this at other companies with similar results.
When it comes to popular times, she said she noticed from the data that stores that are busier during popular times tend to rank higher than stores that are less busy during those times.
“My research has shown that if a business is busy during certain times of the day, they will rank higher than their competitors,” she wrote. She shared some ranking charts in the post.
“We've discovered two new ranking factors. Check out our latest blog post where we present compelling evidence that Google is considering menu items and visit data as ranking factors,” Claudia Tomina posted on X.
Here's X's post:
We've discovered two new ranking factors. Check out our latest blog post where we present compelling evidence that Google is considering menu item and visit data as ranking factors. Let us know what you think! #LocalSEO https://t.co/rmqRSl07xZ pic.twitter.com/N5uqA5uuW0
— Claudia T (@ClaudiaTomina) June 27, 2024
More details can be found in her blog post.
Forum discussion on X.