The 15-minute Google Business Profile checklist every Indian restaurant should run monthly

For most guests, your Google Business Profile is your homepage — they see it before your website, your Instagram, or your door. And like anything that matters, it rots quietly: the Diwali hours still live in March, the "bestseller" photo is from two menus ago, and a stranger answered your top question wrongly four months ago. Fifteen minutes a month fixes all of it. Here is the checklist, in order.

Photos and hours (3 minutes)

Photos: recency beats perfection

Upload at least two new photos. Recency beats artistry — a phone shot from last week outsells a professional shot from 2024, because Google and guests both use photo freshness to judge whether a place is alive. Check that the cover photo still shows what you actually sell. Then verify special hours for the coming month: every public holiday, every extended weekend. Wrong holiday hours are the single most common one-star generator for Indian restaurants, and they are entirely preventable.

Menu, Q&A and the booking link (5 minutes)

Open your menu link on a phone — the way guests see it. Prices current? PDF loads fast? If your menu is a 12-megabyte scan, that is a walkout you cannot measure. Then read every question in the Q&A section and answer the unanswered ones yourself; an unanswered question gets answered by strangers, and they are rarely as kind or as accurate as you. Seed one question a month if none exist — "Do you have parking?", "Is the terrace pet-friendly?" — because seeded questions get asked by real guests at twice the rate.

Products, offers and posts

If your profile supports products or offers, post one. A weekend brunch offer, a new thali, a catering package — Google rewards profiles that post, and guests genuinely browse that carousel more than you'd think. Three minutes, once a month.

The review settings nobody checks (4 minutes)

Finally, the part that actually drives your rating: confirm reply notifications reach a person who is awake (not an inbox nobody opens), check your response rate for the month, and read your three latest reviews as a group — themes are easier to spot in threes than in ones. If you are on Sensiblee, the health score already did this walk for you; the manual checklist is for the month you fall out of the habit.

Fifteen minutes, once a month, on the first Monday. Put it in the calendar with the same energy as the GST filing — it pays better.