Common questions
Questions we hear most
How do restaurants and food businesses get found on Google?
Mostly through Google Maps, which is where diners actually decide. A complete Business Profile, steady reviews, good photography and menu pages that name your dishes and your neighbourhood are what move you up the map results. Two details matter more than most owners expect. Your menu needs to exist as text on a page rather than as a PDF or an image, because a crawler cannot read a picture of a menu, and dish names are exactly what people search. And your photos need refreshing, since profiles with recent images outperform dormant ones in a category where people are choosing with their eyes. Beyond Maps, the searches worth real money are not for the restaurant at all. They are for private dining, group bookings, catering, corporate lunches and classes, and each deserves its own page with capacity, pricing, what is included and how to enquire. Those bookings are worth many times a walk-in and they are barely contested, because most restaurants never build the page. A business with one homepage and a PDF menu is invisible for all of them. A site with a real page per offering captures each search separately, and each page also gives the assistants something specific to quote when someone asks where to hold a birthday dinner nearby.
Do social media ads work for restaurants?
Food is the most naturally visual category on the platforms, which makes social ads unusually efficient when the creative is good. The campaigns that work are built on appetising photography and video, targeted to the area people will actually travel from, and pointed at the nights that need filling rather than the ones already busy. As a real example, our Facebook campaigns for Le Dolci Culinary School have returned leads at $8 each and a 4x return on spend across five years of continuous work. Two things explain that. The offer is bookable, since a class or an event has a date, a price and a limited number of places, and social advertising works far better for something bookable than for a general invitation to visit. And the creative gets refreshed, because food creative fatigues quickly. The same video that pulled well in March will cost more per lead by June, so a working account always has something new in it. What we avoid is discounting. A discount fills seats once and trains people to wait for the next one, and it drags margin in a category that does not have much to spare. Owning a quiet night with something people actually want, a set menu, a class, a supper club, holds up far better than 20 per cent off.
What does a booking cost from advertising?
It depends on what you are selling, and the honest answer is a range we establish in your first month and then improve. A $200 tasting menu, a $95 cooking class and a corporate catering enquiry justify very different acquisition costs, so a single blended cost per booking across a food business tells you almost nothing. We track cost per enquiry and cost per booking for each offering separately, then weight budget toward whatever is returning best that month. Two adjustments change the number more than targeting does. The first is what the ad asks for. Asking someone to book a specific class on a specific date produces fewer, better enquiries than asking them to get in touch. The second is what happens next: an enquiry about a private event that sits unanswered until the following afternoon is usually gone, because the person is contacting three venues in one sitting. For a class or event business the other figure that matters is how many places a campaign fills against capacity, since a class at 70 per cent full costs almost the same to run as a full one. What we avoid is the empty version of this, reach and impressions reported as though they paid your rent.
How long does SEO take for a food business?
Google Maps moves fastest, often within weeks of a properly built Business Profile and a steady flow of reviews, because the map results respond to profile completeness, proximity and review activity rather than to the age of your website. Organic rankings for the pages that carry real booking value, private dining, catering, cooking classes, typically begin moving within three to six months, and they move sooner than in most categories because so few competitors have built those pages at all. The head terms, your city plus your cuisine, take longer and are worth less than people assume, since most of that intent is satisfied inside Maps anyway. SEO compounds. A food business that has been building pages, gathering reviews and keeping its listings and hours accurate for a year is dramatically harder to displace than one that started last month. The most common thing that stalls it is neglect rather than competition: hours that go stale over a holiday, a menu that changed in the kitchen but not on the site, photos from two fitouts ago. Paid campaigns fill seats and classes this month while that foundation builds, which is why most food businesses we work with run both for the first year and then lean more heavily on the organic side.
Can AI tools like ChatGPT recommend my restaurant?
Yes, and it is happening now. People ask assistants where to eat tonight, where to hold a birthday dinner for twelve, where to learn to make pasta, and which bakery does a proper gluten-free loaf. The tools answer from what they have already crawled and from the sources they trust: your own site, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and the local publications and directories that mention you. Consistency is what decides whether you can be named. If your hours, address, cuisine or booking link differ between your site, your profile and the delivery platforms, the assistant has no confident answer and names someone else. What gets quoted is specific: a page that states your private dining capacity, your set menu price, your class schedule and what is included will be cited, where a page of atmosphere adjectives will not. Menus as text rather than images matter here for the same reason they matter for search. Schema markup helps by stating the facts in a form the machine does not have to interpret, and reviews carry weight because assistants lean on them heavily for local recommendations. We build that citation potential into every site we run, and in food it is already producing bookings rather than curiosity.
