Your primary category is the highest-leverage field on the profile
Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you're eligible for at all. A place set to Restaurant is competing in a much broader, much harder pool than one set to Italian Restaurant or Pizza Restaurant. Specificity narrows the field to searches you can actually win.
Pick the primary category that matches what people would call you, not what feels most impressive. Then add secondary categories for everything else true about you — bar, caterer, breakfast restaurant. Secondary categories widen your eligibility without diluting the primary signal.
Attributes are searchable, and most restaurants leave them empty
Outdoor seating, takeout, delivery, reservations, wheelchair access, good for groups, serves vegetarian. These populate filters people actually use when narrowing a list of restaurants, and an unset attribute reads as a no.
Go through the full list once and set every one honestly. It takes twenty minutes and it's the highest-value unpaid work available on the profile.
Photos matter for cadence, not volume
A profile with two hundred photos uploaded three years ago looks abandoned. A profile with a handful added every month looks like a business someone is running. Freshness is the signal, not the count.
Mix food, interior, exterior and staff. The exterior shot matters more than people expect — it's what someone matches against when they're standing outside trying to work out if they're in the right place. Geotagging photos does nothing; that's a persistent myth.
Hours, including the ones you only need twice a year
Wrong hours are the fastest way to turn a search into a bad review. Google actively surfaces uncertainty about hours to users, and a profile repeatedly corrected by the public is a profile Google trusts less.
Set special hours for every holiday in advance. Most restaurants do this reactively on the day, which is exactly too late for the person who already drove over.
The menu belongs on the profile, not just the website
Add the menu link, and where the category allows it, add the individual items. Menu items are indexable content attached to your profile, which means dish-level searches can find you — the thing your website's PDF menu can never do.
What not to do
Don't put keywords in the business name. "Joe's Pizza — Best Pizza Downtown" is a policy violation, it's the most commonly reported one, and it risks suspension of the whole profile. The upside is small and the downside is total.
Don't create a second profile for takeout, catering or the bar unless they're genuinely separate businesses with separate entrances and staff. Duplicate profiles split your signals and one of them usually gets removed.