Your menu is a photograph, so nobody can search it.
The dish you are known for is written down somewhere no machine can read, which is the same as not having written it.
The short answer
Somebody hungry types a dish, not a restaurant. If your menu is a photograph or a PDF, the words on it do not exist as far as search is concerned, and neither do you.
A menu written as text on a page is the cheapest thing on this list and almost nobody does it.
How somebody actually picks where to eat
The decision is made on a phone, usually within a few minutes, often while already walking. What gets seen is the map: photographs, hours, how far away, and what other people said.
The website is rarely the thing that decides it. The listing is, and the listing is free.
Why a picture of a menu costs you
A search engine reads text. A photograph of a menu contains no text, only pixels arranged to look like some. So every dish you are known for is invisible, and the search for that dish goes to somebody who typed theirs out.
An assistant asked to recommend somewhere for a specific dish has the same problem, for the same reason.
The photographs are doing more work than the design
People look at pictures of the food and the room before they read a word. Photographs taken in your own place, in daylight, outperform anything bought from a library, because a customer can tell the difference and is checking whether the place is real.
What to do this week
Type the menu out as text on a page, with prices, and keep the pretty version as well if you want it. Fill in the hours, including the ones that change in summer. Put up photographs from your own kitchen.
None of that is a project and all of it is the part that gets read.
Send us your menu the way a customer finds it, and we will tell you which dishes are invisible. Get a free audit.
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