Bars and Clubs are always popular but, like many other businesses, they need to compete within a very small, yet fierce, environment. Because locality is always a huge factor, you’re often competing against a wide number of other companies for the same base of customers.
Here, we’ve explored some of the key ways an SEO agency can benefit a restaurant. This is true for individual restaurants, or wider chains. For the latter, just remember that each individual location needs to be advertised and, if possible, targeted separately. For now, let’s look at how we can help!
A Question Of Locality
Location is always a big priority when it comes to restaurants. When it comes to being visible online, this is something you also need to consider.
As a local business, your address needs to be highly visible. When optimising your website, you should strive to put these contact details on the very first page. Supporting this with accurate directory listings should ensure your current phone number and address appear online.
This is important when you consider the growing influence of mobile searching. Users on portable devices want quick results. If they can find your restaurants number, they can directly call you – while this doesn’t go through your website, it nonetheless converts users into paying customers. Similarly, when people are in town and want to find somewhere close to eat, your address will help them find you on map listings, too.
Out Of Town Business
It makes sense to target the obvious keywords, such as “restaurant in [location]”, but how narrow should your keyword analysis go? In truth, restaurants and many other local walk-in businesses can benefit from some very specific long-tail keywords.
This is vital when you want to also draw in customers from out of town. These people may not be familiar with your area, but they will possibly know some of the landmarks. For example, you might find people actively search for “restaurants in Birmingham city centre” or “restaurants near the London eye”. These may not have high search volumes, but they represent users actively searching for a specific need and potentially even closer to converting into customers.
Visual Impact
Dining businesses ultimately rely on a number of visual properties to please customers. This includes the atmosphere and ambiance of the restaurant itself, as well as the visual appeal of the food. After all, the first taste is with the eyes, and this is just as important when designing your website.
Your website doesn’t need too many pages. Your contact details should be clear on the home page and aside from a blog, menu and pages for other specialist services, you don’t need to go to wide. This will allow readers to quickly consume what your website has to offer, getting a sense of your business, while also keeping your crawling budget down low.
Yet, as mentioned, visual impact matters. A well designed website should offer photographs of the restaurant and its signature food. If people want Mexican food, for instance, they expect to see this when they land on your page. Not seeing this, on the other hand, might result in a higher bounce rate.
The Menu
As for the menu itself, you need to be careful how you optimise this. Many businesses choose a downloadable PDF but, in an age of mobile searching, it’s often better to have something people can quickly see online.
Don’t forget to use social media and blogs to advertise when your menu changes, as well! This will keep your regular, local customers interested in quieter periods.
Similarly, if you’re offering multiple languages, be sure to correctly tag these languages and, often, it’s better to have your menu in all languages at once, rather than separate menus. Individual menus will result in pages that have a language disconnect to the rest of the website and search engines might not interpret this incorrectly.