A menu saved as a photograph

Somebody searches for gluten free pasta near them at seven in the evening. A restaurant three streets away has exactly that, on page two of a menu that was photographed, cropped and uploaded as a JPEG. The search engine looks at the image, sees a rectangle of pixels, and moves on. The restaurant never appears. The customer eats somewhere else and neither party ever knows what happened.

That is the whole failure, and it repeats across every trade. The menu as a photograph. The price list as a scanned PDF. Opening hours that exist only inside an image with a nice font. To a person these look like information. To every machine that decides who gets found, they are furniture.

Machines are not the only readers locked out. A visitor using a screen reader gets nothing from a photographed menu. A visitor on a slow connection waits for a two megabyte image to deliver what fifty lines of text would have delivered instantly. A visitor trying to translate the page gets nothing to translate.

The repair is text, plus a thin layer of structure underneath it. Real text on the page, so anyone and anything can read it. Then structured data, which is a standard vocabulary that tells search engines exactly what they are looking at: this is a menu, this is a section, this is a dish, this is its price. Google publishes the vocabulary openly and rewards the businesses that use it, because it makes their own job easier.

None of this is visible to the eye. The page looks the same after the work as before it. What changes is who can find it, which is the only thing the page was ever for.

If your prices live inside an image, the search engines serving your customers have never read them. This is the kind of thing I fix.