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Your Google listing is a more important shopfront than your website, and the delivery apps you rely on are keeping the customer you paid to acquire. Both of those are fixable.
What you can expect
Map pack and review velocity treated as the priority
Direct ordering built to reduce commission
Seasonal planning around December and January
Service focus
Most decisions about where to eat are made on a map, on a phone, within about twenty minutes of eating. The search is 'thai food near me' or 'pizza open now', and what comes back is a short list ranked partly on distance and partly on the strength of each listing. Whoever wins that shortlist wins the evening. That makes your Google Business Profile a more commercially important asset than your website: the opening hours, the primary category, the menu, the photographs, the star rating, the number of reviews and how recently they arrived. Review recency counts for more here than in almost any other sector, because a rating built up three years ago says nothing about the kitchen tonight, and diners read the newest ones first. Photography is judged just as hard. A profile dominated by dim customer snapshots of half-eaten plates loses to a competitor with the same food and better pictures. Bank holiday and Christmas hours left wrong are a quiet, repeating loss nobody notices.
Delivery aggregators are a real trade rather than a swindle, but the terms deserve honest arithmetic. Commission on orders the platform delivers commonly sits somewhere in the mid-twenties to around thirty per cent of order value, and falls sharply if you handle delivery yourself, with rates varying by contract and negotiable in practice. On top of that the platform holds the customer relationship. You do not get the phone number or the email address. You cannot tell that person you have opened a second site, or that Tuesdays are quiet, or that there is a new menu. The platform can, and it will happily offer them a discount at the kitchen down the road. None of that means leaving — for many operations the volume is worth the commission, and the aggregator works perfectly well as a paid acquisition channel. It means treating it as one, and having somewhere for a repeat customer to go: the same order at a fraction of the commission, and the data stays with you.
Covers and delivery are two businesses sharing one kitchen. A table of four ordering drinks carries a margin that a delivery order rarely matches, and it is limited by seats and service times rather than by demand. Delivery has no drinks margin, is capped by the pass and by driver availability, and can wreck the dine-in service if the balance tips too far. Marketing should follow whichever side has spare capacity, because filling a quiet Tuesday dinner service is a completely different job from pushing Friday delivery volume you cannot physically cook. Bookings behave seasonally and predictably. December is set months ahead and Christmas party enquiries start arriving in early autumn, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day sell out, and January is thin for everybody. Weather moves delivery within hours. A restaurant with no booking system and no way to capture a party enquiry in September has lost the most profitable weeks of its year before they arrive.
Common challenges
01
Hours wrong over the bank holiday, the menu link broken, the last review answered eighteen months ago, and the top photo taken by a customer in 2021. That listing is doing more selling than anything else you have, and it is the only asset with no one responsible for it.
02
Two thousand orders a year through the apps and not one contactable customer. When the platform changes its commission, promotes a competitor or runs a discount you did not want to fund, there is no channel of your own to fall back on because the relationship was never yours.
03
People choose food with their eyes and they choose it from thumbnails. Menu items with no image, dishes shot under service lighting, and no photo of the room itself — which is what a group deciding on somewhere for a birthday is actually looking for.
Service breakdown
Primary category set correctly for what you actually sell, hours maintained including bank holidays and Christmas, dish-level menu data, ordering and booking links, and photographs replaced regularly. For a restaurant this is the highest-value hour of work available and it is usually the one nobody has been given. Multi-site operators get each location managed separately, because they compete in different shortlists.
A routine that asks at the right moment without incentivising, so the flow is steady rather than a burst before a quiet spell. Replies to the bad ones written to be read by the next customer rather than by the complainant, which is the part most operators get backwards.
A direct route that is genuinely competitive with the apps on convenience, promoted where the repeat customers already are: bag inserts, receipts, the profile, the site. Every order moved across keeps the commission and the customer data.
Proper images of the dishes that sell, of the room, and of the things a group needs to see before booking. Menus published as readable pages rather than a PDF, so they can appear in search results and be read on a phone.
Cuisine and neighbourhood pages, structured data for menus and opening hours, and content aimed at the searches that convert: dietary requirements, group bookings, private hire, and the awkward specific ones like whether you take bookings for eight on a Saturday.
Spend timed to the calendar rather than spread evenly: Christmas party enquiries pushed from early autumn, January promoted hard because everybody else has gone quiet, and delivery pushed on the nights the kitchen has room.
We will review your site, your search visibility and your competitors, then send back the specific fixes worth doing first.
Why us
For most restaurants the Google profile is where the decisions happen. If that is neglected, a new site is decorating the wrong room.
Aggregators earn their place for some kitchens and not for others. We work it out against your actual order mix rather than assuming direct ordering is automatically better.
Christmas is sold in September and January is survived rather than won. Budget follows the trading year instead of being divided into twelve equal parts.
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FAQ
Usually not, and certainly not abruptly. Look at what proportion of app orders are repeat customers and what the commission on those is costing you across a year. New customers you would never have reached are worth paying an acquisition fee for. Repeat customers ordering the same thing every Friday through a platform taking a quarter or more of the order value are the expensive part, and those are the ones worth moving to direct ordering with bag inserts and a reason to switch. Most kitchens end up running both: the apps for reach, direct for the regulars.
Ask everyone, ask consistently, and never incentivise — offering a discount or free item for a review breaches Google's policies and risks the whole review set. What works is timing and friction: ask when the meal has just gone well, make it one tap from a QR code on the bill or a link on the receipt, and have staff mention it rather than a poster. Steady flow beats volume. Twelve reviews spread across a quarter looks healthier to a diner, and to the ranking, than sixty that arrived in one week.
Yes, but a smaller one than most restaurants build. It needs to do four things: show the menu as readable text, take bookings, take direct orders, and capture party and private hire enquiries. That is where the profitable business comes from — a fifteen-person Christmas booking or a private hire enquiry is worth many delivery orders and cannot be taken through an aggregator. Everything else, including the long paragraph about the chef's philosophy, is optional. The menu in particular should never be a PDF.
Earlier than feels natural. Party organisers start looking in early autumn, and the groups who book first are the large ones you most want. That means a bookable party page live in September with menus, prices per head, deposit terms and capacity, promoted through search and to your existing customer list. Leaving it to late November means competing for the leftover small bookings. The same logic runs in reverse for January: plan that promotion in December, while you still have people in the room to tell about it.
Free consultation
Tell us what you want to grow and we will review the best next steps for your website, search visibility, and enquiries.