When we checked 64 Dominican restaurants, we expected the story to be about websites. It wasn't. Ninety-eight percent had a Google Business Profile — the panel that appears beside search results with your hours, photos, reviews and a link to your site. It's the front door almost every customer actually uses.

And roughly one in six of those front doors led nowhere. A menu link pointing at a deleted Google Drive file. A website field pointing at a domain that had expired and was now for sale. A Facebook address and an email pasted together into one malformed URL. A flipbook published in 2020.

Every one of those is free to fix and takes minutes. This is the audit, in order, and you can do the whole thing in about half an hour.

Before you start

You need to be able to edit your profile, which means claiming it if you haven't. Search your business name on Google; if you see "Own this business?" you haven't claimed it. Verification usually takes a few days by postcard, phone or video, so start that now and do the rest when it comes through.

Everything below is free. There is no paid tier of Google Business Profile, and anyone charging you monthly to "manage your Google listing" should be able to show you exactly what they're doing that this article doesn't cover.

Minutes 1–5: Look at it as a customer

Don't open the dashboard yet. Search your own business name on Google, on your phone, exactly as a customer would.

Then click every link in the panel. Your website link. Your menu link. Your booking link if there is one. Actually click them and watch what happens.

This is the step almost nobody does, and it's where the failures we found were hiding — every broken link in our study was sitting in plain sight on a listing the owner presumably believed was fine. If a link goes somewhere dead, wrong, or embarrassing, you've just found your most valuable half hour of the year.

Note what's wrong. Then open the dashboard.

Minutes 5–10: Fix the links

The website field should point at your own website's homepage. Not a Facebook page, not a Linktree, not a delivery app, not a directory someone else owns, and not a PDF. If you genuinely have no website, a social page is better than nothing — but be aware that in our study five restaurants in one town had this field pointing at the same third-party directory, meaning their hours and prices were being published by a company with no obligation to keep them correct.

Check for malformed URLs. One café in our study had `facebook.com/name // email@gmail.com` typed into the field, so the published link was broken. Copy the URL out and paste it into a browser to be sure.

The menu link (restaurants) should point at a page on your own site. If it currently points at a Drive file, a PDF host, a shortened link or a flipbook, replace it. Those all eventually break, and in our sample several already had.

Add the missing ones. Several businesses we checked had no website field at all, with Google actively prompting "Add website" — including one with nearly ten thousand reviews.

Minutes 10–15: Hours, and the closure trap

Set your regular hours accurately, and use the special-hours feature for holidays. Semana Santa, Christmas and Independence Day are exactly when a customer checks whether you're open.

If you're temporarily closed, say so and set a reopening date. The best example we found was a Bávaro restaurant that stated plainly on its page that it was closed for a remodel, gave a reopening month, and pointed people to its sister locations. That's a business handling a closure properly.

Check you're not marked closed by mistake. This is the one that should worry you most. We found a restaurant marked permanently closed on Google while its Instagram — with 35,000 followers — was announcing a new location. Google was telling every searcher that a relocating business was dead. If your listing says closed and you're not, fix it today; that single field can end a business.

Minutes 15–20: Photos, and the categories

Photos matter more than owners think. Add real ones: the exterior so people recognise it from the street, the interior, the product or food, the team. Replace anything years old. Businesses with current photos consistently look open and active; businesses with three dark photos from 2019 look closed even when they're not.

Check your primary category is right, because it drives which searches you appear in. We found a restaurant listed as a "catering food and drink supplier" and another whose Google entity was a hotel listing — no hours, no menu — despite being a working restaurant. Add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do.

Confirm your address puts the pin in the right place. One restaurant in our study had no profile at all, and searching its name put the map pin on a business of the same name in Mexico.

Minutes 20–25: The details that answer questions

Fill in the attributes, because they answer the questions customers otherwise have to ask: accepts credit cards, has parking, wheelchair accessible, outdoor seating, delivery, takeout, reservations, Wi-Fi, family-friendly.

Add your WhatsApp number where the field allows it, or put it in the description. In our hotel study only 25% of sites had a WhatsApp link anywhere, in a country where it's the dominant business channel.

Write the description — 750 characters, in the language your customers search in, saying plainly what you do and where. Not marketing copy. A clear sentence like "Family-run Dominican restaurant in Zona Colonial serving traditional dishes since 1996, with terrace seating and delivery in Santo Domingo" does more work than a paragraph about passion.

Minutes 25–30: Reviews, and a reason to come back

Reply to your reviews — the recent ones, good and bad. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by everyone who comes after and says more about you than the complaint does. Never argue.

Ask for reviews. Not through a service, not with incentives — just ask happy customers, in person or in a follow-up message. It's the single strongest signal your listing carries.

Post something. Google Posts appear on your listing and show the business is alive: a new dish, a seasonal offer, a schedule change. Even monthly beats never.

Set a reminder for six months

The reason these listings break is not incompetence — it's that nobody's job is to check them. A link that worked when it was added stops working when a domain lapses or a file is deleted, and nothing tells you.

So the last minute of this half hour is the most valuable: put a recurring reminder in your calendar to repeat the five-minute customer check twice a year. Search your name, click every link, confirm the hours. That habit is what separates the listings that keep working from the ones we found pointing at a GoDaddy sale page.

Why this comes before your website

If you take one thing from this: for most Dominican businesses, fixing the Google listing produces more customers per hour of effort than anything you could do to your website. It's free, it's fast, and it's the thing customers actually see first.

That's an odd argument for a web development company to make, and we're making it because our own research forced it. Websites matter — a listing that links to nothing is only half a solution, and the pages you control are the ones that don't go stale. But the order of operations is clear, and it starts with the free half hour.

When you're ready for the other half — a site the listing can actually point at, with your menu or services as real text in both languages — contact us for a free consultation. And if you'd just like us to look at what your listing currently points at, we'll do that and tell you honestly, whether or not you need anything else.