Marketing for a Pizza Shop: Fix These Three Things Before You Spend a Dollar

Most advice about marketing a pizza shop starts with posting. Post the cheese pull. Post the Friday special. Run a boosted post at the high school.

That advice assumes the part before the post is working — that when somebody who has just decided on pizza goes looking, they find you, they find the right hours, they find the right prices, and the order lands in your till rather than somewhere else.

For a lot of independent shops, that part is not working, and it is broken in ways that are specific to food service. Not “your website is dated.” Three concrete failures that mostly don’t happen to plumbers or accountants, because plumbers and accountants don’t have four other companies making money selling their product.

Here they are, cheapest first.

1. Your hours are not a detail. In this category they’re closer to a switch.

It is 6:41 on a Friday. Somebody wants pizza inside the hour. They search, they get three shops, and one of them says Closed.

Maybe it is closed. Maybe the hours were entered once in 2021 and nobody has touched them since. Maybe the summer hours went in and the winter hours never did. Maybe last Monday was a holiday and the holiday-hours field — which is a separate field, and the one everybody forgets — said open when the door was locked.

The customer does not investigate. They do not call to check. They tap the next one.

And it is worse than one lost order, because your hours aren’t only what the customer reads. They appear to be an input into whether you get shown at all.

BrightLocal ran a study on exactly this: do businesses rank differently inside their opening hours than outside them? Of ten categories tested, fast-food restaurants moved the most — local rankings improved by 2.4 positions on average during opening hours.

Two honest caveats, because you should get them from me rather than find them yourself: that study looked at fifty locations across ten categories and was published in December 2023, so it is a signal, not a law. And Google’s own search liaison, quoted in the same research, said that while openness is part of local ranking, the signal “might change.”

Fine. It is still the only category in that study that moved by more than a single position, and it is yours. If your hours are wrong you may be losing the customer and the position, at precisely the hour you can least afford to lose either.

Cost to fix: four minutes. It is a field. Do the holiday hours in the same sitting.

2. The menu on your Google profile may not be the menu you wrote.

Here is the one that costs the most and that almost nobody checks.

Pull up your own shop on Google, on your phone, the way a customer would. Look at the menu it shows. Now compare a few prices against what you actually charge today.

If those numbers don’t match, you have a problem that compounds: you lose orders from people who think you’re expensive, and you get arguments at the counter from people who arrive quoting a price you stopped charging two years ago. Your sixteen-year-old on the register is now negotiating on your behalf.

Why does it happen? Google documents it. The Business Profile help page for the menu editor says the feature is available to food and drink businesses, that Google may identify multiple menu sources for a business, and that the owner can “select your preferred menu.”

Read that last part backwards, because it is the whole thing:

If there can be several sources, and you get to select your preferred one, then an owner who has never gone in and selected has had one selected for them.

That could be a delivery app’s copy of your menu from eighteen months ago. An aggregator that scraped a PDF off a site you replaced. Somebody’s photograph of the wall board, taken in different light, in a different year, at different prices.

That is your pricing, on your listing, in front of a customer who believes it is official — because it looks official, and because it appeared first.

Cost to fix: twenty minutes and no money, if you go in and set it yourself.

3. A platform may be taking your orders without your agreement.

This one is not a rumour and it is not a horror story from a forum. It is a federal enforcement action.

In December 2024 the Federal Trade Commission and the Illinois Attorney General took action against Grubhub. Among the findings: Grubhub had listed as many as 325,000 unaffiliated restaurants on its platform — in the FTC’s own words, “more than half of all of the available restaurants on Grubhub” — going back to at least 2019.

What the FTC says the harm to those restaurants actually was is worth reading in full, because every item is operational rather than abstract:

Orders got diverted. Customers who would have ordered from the restaurant’s own page ordered through the platform instead, so the restaurant lost both the margin and the customer relationship.
Restaurants received orders for items they don’t serve.
Drivers turned up paying with platform cards that were “sometimes declined for insufficient funds” — the restaurant made the food and didn’t get paid for it.
When a delivery arrived late or in poor condition, diners blamed the restaurant.

The stipulated order, entered 31 December 2024, requires Grubhub to stop listing unaffiliated restaurants and to list restaurants only with their consent.

So here is a thirty-second job for tonight: search your own shop’s name plus the word “delivery,” and look at what comes back. If there is a storefront you don’t remember creating, you have a page you don’t control, showing prices you didn’t set, taking orders you can’t see, with your name and your reputation attached.

I am not going to tell you that one is a five-minute fix, because it isn’t, and the route differs by platform. What I will tell you is that you cannot fix a surface you don’t know exists, and most owners have never looked.

And one thing nobody can fix, which you should know before you pay anyone

If your shop has two pins on Apple Maps, you will eventually meet somebody who offers to merge them.

Apple currently documents no route for merging duplicate place cards. Anyone promising a merge is describing a button that does not exist.

What can honestly be done is: claim the correct one, correct it, report the duplicate, and then be told the duplicate is still outstanding — rather than being told the job is done.

That is the ceiling. It is worth knowing where the ceiling is before somebody sells you a position above it.

The order of operations

Nothing above is about your pizza, and nothing above is about posting more. It is about the thirty seconds between “we should get pizza” and somebody tapping a name.

If you want to work through it yourself, this is the order:

Hours on Google, including holiday hours. Four minutes.
The menu Google shows, against your real prices today. Twenty minutes.
Your name + “delivery,” searched honestly. Thirty seconds to look, longer to resolve.
Your newest review — read the date, not the stars. Five stars from 2023 does not read as “good.” It reads as “closed.”
Apple Maps. Are there two of you?
Your own site’s menu page. Does it match items 2 and 5?

Or have it checked properly

Run the same check yourself, free. The Presence Audit is the six-surface check written down — eight pages, scored out of 44, in the order above. It costs nothing. → https://ziplinecreative.gumroad.com/l/presence-audit

If it comes back mostly about Google — hours, menu, categories, photos, reviews — the GBP Optimization Kit is $39 and includes the 30-day activation calendar and the review-request templates. → https://ziplinecreative.gumroad.com/l/gbp-optimization-kit

Or if you would rather it was simply corrected everywhere: the Presence Fix is $349, fixed price, with written proof of every fix and a 30-day re-check. And where a platform doesn’t support a merge — Apple, today — you get told it is outstanding instead of being told it’s done. → https://ziplinecreative.io/presence-fix

Sources

Federal Trade Commission — FTC, Illinois Attorney General Take Action Against Grubhub for Harming Diners, Workers, and Small Businesses, 17 December 2024 (stipulated order 31 December 2024; FTC & Illinois v. Grubhub Inc., 1:24-cv-12923). https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/12/ftc-illinois-attorney-general-take-action-against-grubhub-harming-diners-workers-small-businesses
Google Business Profile Help — About the menu editor. https://support.google.com/business/answer/9455840
BrightLocal — Study: Business Opening Hours and Local Rankings, 21 December 2023 (50 locations, 10 categories). https://www.brightlocal.com/research/study-business-opening-hours-and-local-rankings/