The Problem Isn't The Food
Picture it, because it happens every day. Somebody half a mile from your restaurant decides they do not want to cook tonight. They pick up their phone, and in the next two minutes they land on somebody else’s restaurant.
It is not that the food is better there. It is not that the room is nicer or the prices are lower. It is that the other restaurant was easier to find, and yours was not.
That is the whole problem, and it is the one worth taking seriously — because everything else about your restaurant can be right and it will not matter if the person deciding never gets to you.
What We Look At First
Before we suggest anything, we look properly at what a restaurant already has. Three things, in this order.
Your Website
Your website is what a diner lands on after they have heard about you, and it is where they make the decision. Almost all of them are reading it on a phone, usually in the next half hour, usually while deciding where to go.
So what matters is simple: does it load quickly, can somebody see what you serve and when you are open without hunting for it, and is your phone number and your location easy to find? A diner who cannot answer those in a few seconds does not call to ask. They look at the next restaurant.
Your Google Business Profile
When somebody searches for your restaurant by name — or searches for somewhere to eat in your town — the first thing they usually see is your Google Business Profile rather than your website. The hours, the phone number, the location, the photos, and what other people have said about you.
It is the most-seen page a restaurant has, and the one most often left half-finished. Wrong hours, no photos, or no recent reviews are what a customer reads before they decide. So we go through it properly, and we look at whether it gives somebody a reason to pick you over the place next door.
Your Marketing Performance
The third piece is what your marketing is actually doing — not what was promised when it was sold to you, but what has come in. Where your customers are coming from, and what has changed since you started running something.
If a channel is bringing people through the door, it stays. If it is costing money and producing nothing, the useful thing is to know that rather than keep paying for it.
And all of this happens before anything changes. It is the same starting point as everything else we do: you end up with a clear picture of where you stand and what is worth fixing, and only then is there anything to decide.
Naming The Town You Serve
Here is the part that most restaurants never do. Our own site carries a page for each of the places we work — Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano and Irving — and there is a reason for that.
When somebody is deciding where to eat, they are almost always looking in one place: the town they are in, or the one they are heading to. A page that names that town gives them something of yours to land on. Instead of arriving somewhere general and having to work out whether you cover them, they land on a page that already says the name of the place they are standing in.
For a restaurant, that is the same job your Google Business Profile does: being findable to somebody who is nearby and deciding right now. Every one of those pages carries a phone number and a way to get in touch, so somebody who lands on one can act on it rather than going back to where they came from.
What those pages do not do is promise you a position in search results. Nobody can honestly promise that. What they do is give you something to be found by, in the words a customer actually uses.
Keeping The Customers You Already Have
Being found is the first half. The second half is what happens when somebody who already likes your restaurant wants to order again.
If every one of those orders lives inside a delivery app, the app holds the relationship — and DoorDash charges 25% for online orders. When that same customer orders from your own website instead, the order does not carry that charge. It stays on the order rather than coming off it.
That is the argument for having your own ordering channel, and it is not an argument for leaving the apps. Plenty of restaurants run both, and we would not tell you to switch off a source of trade. The point is that a regular ordering from you directly is a different kind of customer from one ordering through somebody else’s platform, and the order comes to you rather than costing you a cut of it.
Where To Start
If any of this sounds like your restaurant, the useful thing is a proper look at what you have rather than a proposal. For a restaurant that means your website, your Google Business Profile and your marketing performance — and for the payments side, a full analysis of your current processing and your rates.
And our offer for a restaurant is three things: zero cost equipment, 0% fees with Cash Discount, and 3 months free marketing. That is the whole of it, with nothing hiding underneath.
Give us a call, or send your details through the form on this site, and tell us how your restaurant runs today. You will get a straight answer, and there is no obligation to go further.
The takeaway
The food is rarely the reason a nearby diner picks somebody else — being findable is. A website a customer can decide from, a Google Business Profile that is complete, and a page that names the town you serve are the three things worth getting right. Send us your details and we will go through all three with you.
Read more about this on our Restaurant Marketing page.