Spend less on your website and more on being found

A good website for a small food business does not need to cost thousands. What it needs is for the people searching for somewhere to eat near them to actually find it. Get that right and a cheap site earns its keep. Get it wrong and an expensive one just sits there.

The delivery apps are brilliant at something a small shop can't easily do on its own. They put your food in front of people who have never heard of you, on a screen they already have open, and they take the payment and sort the rider. That is worth having, and it is worth keeping. The apps are not the thing to argue with here.

Being found inside the apps is hard for a small shop

There is a catch. Mark Murphy, who founded Burgerism, put it plainly on episode 13 of The Delivery Prophets podcast, recorded as of early 2024:

"food delivery marketplaces are 80-20. So 80% of the volume goes to top 20% of brands."

He was talking about orders on the delivery apps, not every meal a town buys. Inside an app, most of the orders go to the names people already know. Someone scrolling for a burger is far more likely to tap a chain they already know than to keep scrolling down to you.

So the apps are a good way to be ordered from once a customer knows you are there. They are a harder way to be discovered in the first place. A small shop that leans on the app listing alone is waiting to be found in a place where most orders already go to the big names.

Google is where a small shop gets found

Discovery happens somewhere else. When someone wants dinner and types your town and "pizza", or "Thai food near me", into Google, the results are websites, with real names and addresses on them. Guy Meurice, who runs Big Boys Burger Co in Folkestone, said it simply on episode 12 of the Bite Britain podcast:

"Google does a pretty good job of bringing people in."

Mark McCulloch, a hospitality marketer who has worked with Pret and YO! Sushi, made the same point harder in a 2019 keynote in Kiev:

"if you're in page 2 of Google you may as well not exist"

If your shop has a page that answers the exact thing someone searched for, you have a chance of being the one they find. If it doesn't, Google shows them the marketplace, or the place down the road that did bother. You can't be chosen if you aren't on the page.

So spend your money where it counts

That changes where the money should go. Mark McCulloch has been saying it since 2018, on an episode of his Spectacular Marketing Podcast:

"spend as little as you can on the website getting built and as much as you can amplifying that"

A site that costs thousands and then sits there, with nobody sent to it, is money spent in the wrong place. A cheaper site that is built to be read by Google, and then pointed at from everywhere you already are, is money spent where it does something. Amplifying it is the work, and most of it is free.

What you can do this week

You don't need us to start. Here is a day's work that costs nothing:

• Claim and fill in your Google Business Profile. Your hours, phone number, address, a few good photos and a link to your menu. It's free, and it's the thing Google shows first when someone searches for you.
• Ask for reviews. After a good order, ask the customer to leave one. A page of recent, honest reviews is what a stranger reads before they decide.
• Put your link everywhere. Your Instagram bio, your WhatsApp, the bottom of your receipts, a sticker in the window. The link is only useful if people keep meeting it.

Then when someone goes looking, there's a real page of yours for them to land on.

Where Rowbo comes in

Our Website plan is £30 a month. We build the site from your Google listing, so your hours, photos and reviews are already there, and we write and structure the pages so search engines and AI assistants can read them properly. You get your own domain, and you send us a message whenever something needs changing. See what the Website plan covers, or tell us your business name and we'll show you a site built from your own listing.

And when you're ready to take orders yourself, those orders and your app orders can sit on one screen, all in one place. We're connecting the apps now, founding shops first. The website comes first, though, because it's the part that lets new people find you at all.