Marketing for Restaurants

Yes, though not for the reason most restaurants assume. The site is rarely where discovery happens — that is the map pack, review platforms and social — but it is where the two most valuable actions take place: reading the current menu and booking something that makes money, like a private event. Those are also the two things third-party platforms handle worst, because their menus go stale and their event enquiry paths are generic. The other argument is ownership. A restaurant whose entire presence sits on platforms is subject to their algorithm changes, their commission structure and their outages, and has no way to reach past customers directly. The site does not need to be elaborate; it needs a fast readable menu, correct hours, and an obvious path to a booking.

As real text on a real page, not as a PDF and not as an image. This matters more than almost anything else on a restaurant site because the menu is the most-searched thing about any restaurant, and a PDF is slow to open on a phone, frequently unreadable without zooming, and largely invisible as content. An HTML menu loads instantly, can be read one-handed, and lets individual dishes surface in search — which matters because people genuinely search for specific dishes by name alongside a place. Keep prices current, because a menu showing last year's prices produces a bad first interaction at the table, and mark it up with structured data so the platforms that read your site can present it correctly.

By accepting they are different audiences and giving them different things rather than averaging into copy that speaks to neither. Visitors decide on proximity, photographs and recent reviews within about two minutes, so what serves them is a complete profile with current photography, accurate hours and enough recent reviews to look alive. Residents already know you exist and need a reason that this month differs from last — a menu change, a seasonal dish, an event — which is what your social channels and email list are actually for. The seasonal balance in this market means the emphasis should shift deliberately through the year rather than staying fixed: lean into discovery in season, lean into the regulars who carry the quiet months out of it.

It depends what you are buying, and most restaurants have not separated the two things they are paying for. Discovery — being found by someone who did not know you existed — has real value and is difficult to replicate. Transaction handling for a customer who already chose you is worth much less, and paying a discovery-level commission on a repeat regular is the expensive half of the bill. The practical approach is to use the platforms for what they are good at while deliberately building a direct path for people who already know you: a booking link on your own site, an email list, and enough reason to use them. Restaurants that treat platforms as their only channel find their margin structurally capped by someone else's pricing decisions.

Respond to all of them, quickly, and treat the responses as public writing rather than private correspondence — because prospective customers read how you handle criticism more carefully than they read the praise. A defensive reply to a two-star review costs more covers than the review did. Beyond responses, the thing that matters most is recency: a profile whose newest review is four months old reads as a restaurant that may have declined, which is a live concern in a category where quality genuinely does drift. That argues for asking consistently rather than in campaigns. Photographs matter unusually much here as well, and customer photographs carry more weight than professional ones, which makes it worth making your space easy to photograph.