There are two Golden Rules to protecting your Restaurants Google Business Listing from being hijacked by 3rd Party Menu Providers. There are different variations to a hijack, from simply appearing in your restaurants knowledge panel online, to switching out your website for theirs, to receiving orders and payment and not informing the restaurant.

Types of third party menu providers: Vital, eHopper, Poynt, Elo, Dejavoo, PAX, First Data, TSYS, Payarc, Order Hero, GrubHub, Door Dash, Postmates, Seamless, Uber Eats.

 

 

OWN Your Restaurants Google My Business Listing

You must claim and verify your Google Business Listing.
The easiest way that 3rd party menu providers are able to change information is by claiming and verifying the restaurants business listing, they then retain ownership in their account and don’t hand it over to you.

Never ever provide anyone with a PIN number you have received from Google.
Put a sign by the telephone or make it part of your employee handbook so that every member of staff know not to provide anyone with a PIN number.

Visually check your businesses listing in search results regularly.
If you only use your Google My Business Dashboard you will not notice if Google is displaying any 3rd party menu providers within your listing. These can appear at any time if 3rd party scraper like singleplatform scrapes your menu and creates a page for you on their site. They then feed these out to other providers and all of a sudden you may have three or four menu providers appearing within your listing.
 

Claiming or Creating a Google My Business Account for your Restaurant

Before creating a new business listing, check to see if one already exists, search for the current name and its location.

 

 

If the restaurant listing displays “own this business” then click the link and follow the process.

 

Create your Restaurants Google My Business Listing

 

• Sign in to Google My Business.
• Sign in to your Google Account, or create one. Then, click Next.

 
If you have a website and you already use Google Analytics, use this account.
 

Enter your business address. Then, click Next.

Search for and select a business category. You can also choose a more specific category.

Enter a phone number or website URL for your restaurant, and click Finish.

Select a verification option.

 

Once verified you can find your Google My Business Dashboard on a computer will be on: https://business.google.com/locations and its also worth downloading the Google My Business App to manage on the go.
 

View this guide on how to optimise your Restaurants business listing.

 

BE AWARE of Menu Providers Offers

You need to be vary weary of menu providers and fully understand that what they say and do are two very different things. Menu providers entice you with various sparkly things like: creating a website, social media, POS integration etc etc

What they don’t tell you is that 95% of all the orders they will funnel to you – WERE YOUR ORDERS to BEGIN WITH – and of course you get charged their commission.

Let me just repeat that so it sinks in!

Menu Providers offer all these sparkly things to you as a restaurant, but what they don’t tell you, is that all of the orders come direct from your Google business listing, which means that if they were not visible in YOUR business page, customers would have contacted you or ordered direct from you – commission free!

 

 

Even their ads appear within your business listing which can have devastating results on your orders and a rush to remove the 3rd party menu site.

 

But I need a website.
You can create a free single page website within your Google Business Listing.

But I need an ordering system.
Within your Google My Business Listing you can sign up to a Google Partner that offers an ordering and reservation integration for a fixed cost – not on every order total!

 

Removing 3rd Party Menu Ordering Sites

You need to contact each provider and request that they remove your restaurant from their website.

Once removed you must Contact Google Business Support and ask for the site to be removed – it will eventually be removed once Google bot finds your details have been removed, but for quick removal contact support.

 
Google does take action, like in the case of BeyondMenu but it can take a long time by which time your restaurant has been fleeced for tens of thousands in order commissions. Please Be Aware of how they work before you make any decisions on using them.