St. Louis Restaurant SEO: 30% to the App or 2.5% to You
Revised October 22, 2026
Can a beginner do SEO?
Yes. For a single restaurant, most local SEO is data entry and consistency, work you can finish at the bar after close. In St. Louis that includes reading the inspection report the city or county publishes under your name. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, keep your hours right, add your menu in Google’s menu editor, set your own ordering links and a preferred provider, then ask for honest reviews and reply to them. What is still hard after that is the only part worth paying for.
Keep reading ↓Thirty percent. That is what the Uber Eats Premium delivery plan takes once its 30-day intro rate runs out, by the company’s own merchant pricing page. Here is the Friday version of that number: the ticket printer chattering through the dinner rush, a basket of toasted ravioli coming up golden, another bag sealed with somebody else’s sticker on it, a driver leaning on the host stand while the fries go soft under the heat lamp. On a $40 order, that one ticket just paid the app $12.
Scroll down the same page and there is a second number, for an online ordering site you control: “a 2.5% order processing fee + $0.29 per order.” On the same $40 order, that is $1.29. Same company. Same page. The only difference is whose front door the customer walked through. Whoever owns the link owns the customer, and the fee sheet is built around the app owning it. That is not a failure in your kitchen. It is a fee sheet doing what it was written to do.
St. Louis has been angry about this before. In July 2020 the Board of Aldermen passed Ordinance 71193, which capped what delivery apps could charge city restaurants at 20% of each online order. The cap was written to expire 60 days after the city lifted its pandemic limits on dine-in restaurants. Uber’s Premium plan sits ten points above it.
Here is the other public record nobody warns a restaurant about. Inspection reports issued after May 10, 2012 sit in the City of St. Louis’s Healthspace system at healthspace.com/Clients/Missouri/StLouis, linked from the Restaurant Health Ratings and Inspection Reports page. St. Louis County posts its own scores on its own website, so which system holds yours depends on which side of the city line your door is on. A stranger can read your last inspection before they read your menu. Shouldn’t you get to see what they see first?
Can a beginner do SEO?
Yes. For a single restaurant, most local SEO is data entry and consistency, work you can finish at the bar after close. In St. Louis that includes reading the inspection report the city or county publishes under your name. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, keep your hours right, add your menu in Google’s menu editor, set your own ordering links and a preferred provider, then ask for honest reviews and reply to them. What is still hard after that is the only part worth paying for.
How do I do SEO for my restaurant?
Start where the work is free and the coffee is still hot. Sit in a parked car outside your own place and look yourself up the way a first-timer would, one thumb on a glowing screen. Whatever that screen shows is the job. To point the order button at your own link: Business Profile, Food ordering, pick the link, Set as preferred. And know the limit up front: Google states plainly that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.” Which of those would you finish tonight?
Who owes the sales tax on an app order?
At month end the app statements pile up next to the register tape, each one with a neat little tax line at the bottom. It looks finished. It looks handled. In Missouri, for a Missouri restaurant selling to Missouri diners, the Department of Revenue says the restaurant, not the app, is the seller with the primary reporting and remittance duty.
In Letter Ruling LR 8316 (August 30, 2024), the Department told an online ordering company that it is not required to collect and remit Missouri sales tax as a marketplace facilitator for a Missouri restaurant, because those restaurants “are the sellers with primary reporting and remittance obligations under Missouri sales tax law.” Its reading is plain: the restaurant’s responsibility to remit the tax is “a mandatory requirement.”
So the tax line on that receipt is a picture of the liability, not a transfer of it, and the “the app handles it” habit is baked into how these statements read. A short call settles it before an audit does: the Department’s sales tax line is (573) 751-2836, and its tax calendar lists your next due date. Which day this week has ten minutes for that call?
While we’re in the tax weeds: Missouri’s reduced state rate on food is 1.225%, down from 4.225%, but the Department excludes an establishment when food prepared for immediate consumption is more than 80% of its total gross receipts. Its own example is a restaurant over that line, charging the regular rate on all of its food sales.
What do the apps charge, side by side?
This is the part with real money in it, and every number here comes from the platforms’ own published pricing pages, DoorDash’s and Uber’s.
DoorDash lists three marketplace plans: 15% Basic, 25% Plus and 30% Premier on delivery orders, with pickup at 6% on all three. No monthly fee, no signup cost, no cancellation penalty.
Uber Eats lists 20% Lite, 25% Plus and 30% Premium on delivery, with pickup at 7% when your in-app pickup prices match in-store, and 10% without. Self-delivery, where you use your own staff, is 15%.
Then the line on Uber’s own page that stops the conversation. Its Webshop product, a commission-free online ordering site you control, is 2.5% plus 29 cents per order. Same company. Same page. Between 2.5% and 30%, depending entirely on whose front door the customer walks through.
Nobody is telling you to drop the marketplaces. They bring discovery you don’t otherwise get, and for a new restaurant that matters. But St. Louis aldermen looked at this kind of fee sheet in 2020 and wrote 20% into law as the ceiling. What would a Friday night look like if the link on the ticket were yours?
Whose link does your Google profile send people to?
Here is the free part that never shows up in an app’s sales pitch. Google’s Business Profile lets you add custom links that “direct customers to other web pages where they can place orders” from your business, your own site included. You can mark a preferred provider, with separate switches for pickup and for delivery. And when you want a third-party link gone, Google states that “providers must remove third-party links from a profile within 5 business days” of your request.
One trap, because it is an easy mistake with a real cost: Google says that if you turn off “Accept orders on your profile,” any third-party order options and links you add are hidden from your Business Profile. If the goal is to steer people to direct ordering, set a preferred provider instead of switching ordering off. When a hungry stranger taps the order button on that profile, whose link should they land on first?
Wildly off-topic - even restaurant owners get a night off, and Dardenne Prairie eats well.
What does Google say about reviews?
Google’s published position on reviews and local ranking is a single sentence: “More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.” On replying, it says that when you reply to customer reviews, “it shows that you value their feedback,” and that positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out. Nothing there promises you a rank. Reply because the next reader sees that somebody is home. What would your last three replies tell a stranger about the kitchen?
What does a diner see before they walk in?
A couple stands on a Tower Grove sidewalk at seven in the evening, deciding between your door and the one across the street. Phones come out. They tap your profile: are the hours right, does the menu read like food, which button says order online and where does it go. If they are the careful sort, they open the city’s inspection page too. It takes a few taps, and none of it is the apps’ doing. It is the facts you left sitting out there for anyone to find, set next to the competitor’s facts, side by side on the same small screen. The apps will gladly show their version of your restaurant. What does yours say when nobody is guiding the tap?
What’s actually worth doing?
Free, documented, and in rough order of return:
Fix your hours, and keep special hours current. Google lets you set special hours for holidays, special events and other exceptional circumstances. A closed door at a listed open time costs you the customer who already drove over.
Use the menu editor. Items with descriptions and prices, grouped into sections. Allow 24 to 48 hours for changes to appear on Search and Maps.
Set your ordering links and preferred provider. This is the free setting that decides whether an order is a 2.5% order or a 30% one.
Ask for honest reviews and reply to them all. The next reader is watching how you talk to the last one.
Read your own city inspection report. It is public and searchable online, and you will not be the only one reading it.
Put it on the calendar. Pick one slow evening before the month ends, write it on the prep list next to the order sheet, and work down this list with the laptop open and a coffee at your elbow. A job with a date on it gets done; a job that is only a good idea waits for next quarter.
None of that costs anything but an afternoon at the bar after close, laptop next to the register tape. And the restaurant a hungry stranger picks is very often just the one whose information is correct.
Frequently asked questions
How much should I pay for local SEO?
Quotes swing widely, so get any price in writing with exactly what you get each month. What you can do yourself for nothing: profile completion, menu, ordering links, hours, photos and review responses. Establish that before you evaluate any quote. For a yardstick, a Gold listing on St Louis Near Me Directory is $357 a year, paid annually.
Can ChatGPT do SEO?
It can help draft descriptions and organize a menu, but it cannot verify your hours, claim your profile, or change your ranking, and it does not have access to your local data. A more useful question is whether your restaurant information is accurate enough for an assistant to describe you correctly.
What is the 30/30/30 rule for restaurants?
That one is about your books, not about search, and versions get passed around. Ask your accountant which split they mean before you lean on it. Either way it has nothing to do with whether a hungry stranger finds you.
Does the delivery app handle my Missouri sales tax?
Not necessarily. In a 2024 letter ruling (LR 8316) the Missouri Department of Revenue told an online ordering company it is not required to collect and remit Missouri sales tax as a marketplace facilitator for a Missouri restaurant, because the restaurants are the sellers with primary reporting and remittance obligations. Ask your accountant, or the Department, how your own app orders are treated.
Are St. Louis restaurant inspection scores public?
Yes. The City of St. Louis publishes restaurant inspection reports online through a searchable system covering reports issued after May 2012, including restaurants, taverns, carry-outs, grocery stores, caterers and day cares. St. Louis County posts its own scores on its own website. Anyone comparing you to a competitor can look up both in about a minute.
What is the 80/20 rule for SEO?
For a restaurant, read it as a short pile of unglamorous work that does most of the job: an accurate Google Business Profile, correct hours, a real menu, a way to order from you directly, and reviews you actually respond to. Do those before anything anyone sells you as advanced.
How much does SEO typically cost?
Quotes swing widely. The fair test is simple: ask any vendor to list, in writing, the specific tasks they will do each month, then cross off everything on the free list above. Whatever is left is what you would actually be paying for.
What are the 3 C's of SEO?
Versions differ, so ask whoever uses the phrase to name theirs. For a restaurant, the three that matter are on this page: facts that are correct everywhere, a way to order from you directly, and reviews you answer.
Tonight, after the last ticket clears, open your own Google Business Profile and check two things: your hours and your preferred ordering provider. Then keep going with optimizing your Business Profile and responding to reviews.
If you run the kitchen, the bar or the carry-out counter yourself, you already pay for a website, a Google listing and an app that takes its cut. A Gold listing is the piece that makes them work harder: up to 10 categories across 40 location tags, a page that can be indexed and cited by AI on its own, for under a dollar a day. That is how a restaurant gets more customers who order from you, not from the app. See the Gold plan or compare every option. Refuse to be invisible.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.