Google announced on Google+, you can now search restaurants in your area and filter them by price, ratings, cuisine and hours of operation. What you have to do is search for “show me some restaurants in” followed by the name of the city and Google will let you filter the search results based on these factors.
If you are a smartphone user, you can also click on the mic on the top right corner of your smartphone and just speak the query. When you get the results, you can swipe to see more results, or click on the “see all” button. After getting the results you have to say “OK Google, call…” and Google will call the restaurant for you.
Tap the new filter tool to help you break down the search by price, ratings, cuisine, and whether or not the restaurant is open now. As of now, the feature is available only to users in the US, but will be rolled out to other part of the world very soon.
Now, since users can filter restaurant search results by review score, marketers will have to put more efforts in encouraging customer reviews on Google+. You will also have to make sure that you have all the information related to price, cuisine and opening hours on your website that is easily accessible by Google.
You can do this by making sure that your Google Places For Business is updated with as much information as you can provide. Yet another thing you should consider is embedding the Schema markup. By making use of Schema markup you can let Google easily understand and access the information on your website. From the list of Schema markup available for restaurants, make sure the ‘servesCuisine’, ‘openingHours’, and ‘priceRange’ characteristics are included on your website. This will let Google read and index this data and ensure that your restaurant pops up in the search results when customers are filtering their searches.
