Marketing for Restaurants
Your Google profile matters more than your website, your menu needs to be text and not a PDF, and the delivery apps are taking a third of every order they touch.
Three things, in this order
First, the Google profile. Hours, photos, menu, correct category, order links. This is what people actually see when they search for food near them, and it decides most visits. A profile with wrong holiday hours costs you a full day of business and nobody will tell you.
Second, the menu as real text on your website — not a PDF, not an image. A PDF menu is invisible to search, unreadable on a phone, and out of date within a month. Restaurants lose an enormous amount of searchable content this way: every dish name is a thing someone might search for.
Third, direct ordering, because the delivery apps are the most expensive customers you have.
- Google profile treated as the main storefront — photos, hours including holidays, menu, category, and reviews answered
- Menu as text on the page — every dish becomes searchable; a PDF menu is a wall to both Google and phones
- Direct online ordering — the apps take a large cut of every order and own your customer data
- Reservations or waitlist where it applies — and it has to work on a phone in ten seconds
- Photos that are yours and current — food photography is the single highest-return thing in this category
- Bilingual — in Houston this is often not optional, and it's frequently done badly or not at all
The delivery app arithmetic
A third-party delivery order can cost you a large share of the ticket in commission. On thin restaurant margins that can mean an order you barely profit from, or lose money on. And the app keeps the customer relationship — next time, they open the app, not your site.
You probably can't leave the apps; they bring volume and discovery you won't replace. What you can do is make direct ordering the obvious cheaper path for repeat customers: a real order button on your site and your Google profile, a small direct-order incentive, and a receipt that reminds them next time. Every order you shift off the app is nearly pure margin recovered.
This is the rare case where a website change has a direct, calculable dollar effect, and it's why we push restaurants on it.
Reviews and the thing nobody does
Answer your reviews. All of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without arguing. In this category more than any other, prospective customers read the owner's replies to decide what kind of place it is — and most restaurants reply to none.
Beyond that, the highest-leverage recurring habit is fresh photos. Google favors profiles that show activity and customers respond to current food photos more than to anything you write.
Is your menu a PDF?
If so, that's the first thing. Send us your site and we'll list what's costing you searches and what's costing you margin.
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