You cannot publish a price, so the form has to do the qualifying.
You cannot publish a price, so the website has to do the qualifying instead. The caterers who win are the ones whose inquiry form produces a brief you can quote from, rather than another "please send me your pricing".
Every inquiry is a different headcount, on a different date, in a different room.
Three things that make this trade its own problem
"Can you send me your pricing?"
A plain contact box produces an inquiry with none of the five things you need to price anything. Three emails later you learn it is forty people on a date you are already booked for.
Corporate and social are different sales
One is a repeat account with a purchase order and a standing Thursday lunch. The other is a once-in-a-lifetime wedding with a mother-in-law attached. One page cannot talk to both of them.
The gallery is three years old
Grazing tables, plated service, a room set for two hundred. The work photographs beautifully and hardly anybody shoots it, so your whole credibility argument is a folder of phone snaps from a wedding nobody remembers.
You can't add Saturdays, so add to what each one is worth
The calendar is the ceiling. Once the peak dates are gone they're gone, so the figure that moves is spend per head — staffing, bar service, rentals, a dessert course, the late-night round — put in front of somebody at proposal stage instead of left for them to think of. The other half is the quotes that go out and never come back; knowing how many became a signed deposit tells you whether the pitch is the problem.
Type your name in. Watch it become yours.
Switch the device. Change the theme. Type a business name below and the mini-site updates live — this is what it looks like for caterers.
↑ Yours would use your name, your colors, on every phone, tablet and desktop.
Where we would start
- Website DevelopmentSeparate corporate and event paths, each with its own menus, its own gallery and its own inquiry route, instead of one contact page trying to serve a board lunch and a wedding.→
- Forms, Portals & AutomationsAn inquiry flow that collects date, headcount, venue, service style and dietary requirements, so a proposal can go back the same day while they are still deciding.→
- SEOEvent-type-and-city pages plus a page for each venue you regularly work in, because caterers get searched for alongside the room at least as often as on their own.→
- Email MarketingThe corporate account program — the standing orders and repeat bookings where catering revenue actually compounds instead of starting from zero each January.→
Local or national — where this one is actually decided
Local to regional, bounded by how far the vans will go on the day. Relationships with venues and event planners move more work than rankings ever will.
Where we have actually done this
We run Google Ads for a grazing-board and event catering business in the San Francisco Bay Area — corporate and private events, real spend read live out of the account. Described rather than named, at the account's choice, and the audited figures are published in full at /work/google-ads/results/ rather than kept to a screenshot. It is the same qualifying problem this page is about: search traffic that has to turn into a quoted date, not another "send me your pricing".
Work the number out before you spend anything
What a slow reply costs you. Free, no sign-up, and the answer is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Open the tool
Tell us what your customers search for
Describe the inquiries you want more of and the ones you would rather stop getting. You will get a straight read on what would actually move it, from the person who would do the work.