Restaurant Marketing
Independent restaurants and small groups across the Chattanooga area
Restaurant decisions are made in minutes, on a phone, usually within a few miles of where the person is standing. Almost none of that happens on your website. It happens in the map results, in photographs, in reviews and on the platforms that sit between you and the guest, which is where this work concentrates.
What makes this different
Your Google listing matters more than your website
Hours, photographs, menu, reviews and the ability to book or order are consumed directly in the search results. A restaurant with a beautiful site and a neglected profile loses to one with the opposite. That is where the first and largest share of the work goes.
Photographs are the menu
Food photography drives the decision more than description ever will, and most restaurants are relying on whatever guests have posted. Original images of the dishes you actually want to sell, used consistently everywhere, is one of the few levers that moves quickly.
The delivery platforms are a tax and a channel at once
Third party ordering brings volume at a commission that can erase the margin on the order. The sensible aim is not to abandon them but to shift repeat guests toward direct ordering, which is a measurable, winnable objective rather than a slogan.
Demand is driven by occasion and season
Mothers Day, graduations, holiday parties and the tourist calendar produce predictable peaks. Marketing that ignores them spends evenly across a year that is not even, and misses the bookings that are easiest to win.
The platforms this runs on
We work with the systems you already have rather than asking you to move to ours.
Google Business Profile
The single highest value property a restaurant owns. Menu, attributes, photographs, hours including holiday hours, booking and ordering links, and review responses. Most of the visibility gap between similar restaurants in the same neighborhood comes down to how well this is maintained.
Toast and point of sale integration
If your point of sale carries online ordering, the question is whether guests can reach it from everywhere they encounter you, and whether you can tell which marketing produced which orders. Direct ordering keeps margin that the third party platforms take.
OpenTable and Resy
Reservation platforms bring discovery as well as bookings, and they have their own visibility rules. Covers booked through them are worth tracking separately from walk ins and from direct bookings so the trade off is visible.
Delivery marketplaces
DoorDash and Uber Eats are a channel with a cost. Worth measuring honestly: order volume against commission, and what share of those guests ever order directly afterward. That number usually decides the strategy on its own.
Content built for how your buyers search
Every one of these earns its own page, because each answers a different question at a different point in the decision.
Menu pages that are actually text
A menu published as a PDF or an image is invisible to search and painful on a phone, and it is still the most common mistake in the category. Real text, structured properly, is readable by both diners and search engines.
Private dining and events
The highest value bookings a restaurant takes, and usually the thinnest page on the site. Capacity, layouts, minimums, photographs of the space set up, and a straightforward way to inquire.
Occasion and neighborhood content
People search for an occasion and an area far more than for a cuisine. Being the obvious answer for the handful of occasions you serve best is more achievable than competing on a cuisine term across a city.
The story behind the food
Chefs, sourcing, how a dish came about. This is what earns coverage from local press and food writers, and those links do more for visibility than anything you can publish about yourself.
What the monthly report leads with
Impressions and rankings are inputs. These are the numbers that tell you whether the work paid for itself.
- Direct orders and covers against third party channels, with commission shown
- Map pack visibility and the actions taken from your Google listing
- Reservations by source, so platform fees can be judged
- Review volume, rating and response rate
- Event and private dining inquiries, tracked separately
Frequently asked questions
Should we try to get off the delivery apps?
Rarely all at once, because they do bring guests you would not otherwise reach. The realistic goal is shifting repeat guests to direct ordering where you keep the margin, and that requires knowing what each channel actually costs you. We start by measuring it.
How important is our website compared to our Google listing?
The listing is more important for getting found and often for the booking itself. The site matters for menus, events and private dining, where people need more than the listing can hold. Both are needed, but the listing is where the first work goes.
Do you shoot food photography?
Yes. Original images of the dishes you want to sell, used consistently across your listing, your site and the ordering platforms, is one of the fastest improvements available to most restaurants.
Our menu is a PDF. Does that matter?
More than almost anything else on the site. A PDF menu cannot be read by search engines, is hard to use on a phone and is frequently out of date. Converting it to real structured text is usually the first thing we change.
The services behind this work
Other industries we work in
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