Restaurant owners may create the most delicious food on Earth, but when it comes to Digital Marketing, owning a website is an acquired taste that pays off.
What happens the moment your restaurant goes digital? Well, for some, nothing.
Those are the restaurant owners who didn’t understand how to harness the power of a website effectively.
As a website owner, you immediately have an advantage over many, many of your competitors who don’t have a respectable digital presence.
As a local business, this online presence can depend on multiple platforms to attract more customers – securing your loyal followers like clockwork.
Owning a website also opens up a plethora of options and strategies you can now use to market your business – things like Pay Per Click and Local SEO are incredibly beneficial to small and medium-sized restaurants, and they are essential if you want to expand into a multi-national or a chain.
In this article, we will go over the benefits of owning a website, as well as tips and tricks to get the most out of your digital platform.
Getting a website
People judge the quality of your entire business based on the look of your website. Therefore, if you don’t have a website or even worse, you have an outdated website that works poorly, change the digital platform entirely.
There are several ways to go through with this.
WordPress is the platform of choice for 455 million users, and that number continues to grow every day.
However, there are some choices available, such as visual builders, which we advise against since they are not as optimized as other choices out there and will limit you once you have to scale up your website.
We advise you to get a website from a respectable web design agency such as Digital Visibility Concepts.
Changing the design to accommodate users’ needs
Although you have a website, to have a great website you need to put a little bit more work into it.
First of all, the design is everything.
You probably don’t need plenty of copy since it’s an industry that relies heavily on visual content, which means it’s even more important to make sure your website speaks for you whenever people are looking for a palatable way to spend their time.
Once you have chosen a template (or created a custom one with DVC), you can start focusing on tweaking it as much as possible to earn yourself the trust and confidence of your audience.
Focus on making the entire platform more accessible:
Ideally, you want people to find the contact information as quickly as possible so that they can book/query quickly.
It’s vital to make the website mobile-friendly.
Most restaurants are chosen “on the moment”, meaning that most of your visitors will come from mobile searches – people that are already out and are just looking for a place to eat for the night normally enquires from their mobiles!
Therefore, it’s evident that your platform needs to be optimized to give mobile users the same high-quality experience desktop users are getting.
Ensure you have opening times:
You have to allow people
Do you do takeaway? Advertise it:
A takeaway ordering functionality native to a website can be quite expensive and tough to create, so you have to show people they can buy directly from your website using copy and relevant paid ads.
Win using local SEO
Now, here comes the part you were waiting for.
It’s time to get your website up to the top with local SEO.
Simply enough, you tweak your presence around to make sure Google knows you are a business in a local area that users should find whenever they are searching for “restaurants near me”
.
That website right up at the top of the list whenever you search for “restaurants near me” gets 90% of the search traffic. We are talking about tens of thousands that are interested in your hospitality.
Local SEO is a broad topic, but to get started, you should sign your website up on the Google My Business listing.
After filling out all the relevant information and accepting the terms and conditions, you’ll already be well on your way to throwing your restaurant in the spotlight.
How to get started with restaurant SEO
In reality, Google My Business is only the beginning.
We are just scratching the surface of what you can do for your business.
Keyword optimization is a must, now that you have been listed on Google My Business.
Using a keyword optimization tool such as SEMrush is going to make your life much, much easier, but those tools are expensive and take some studying on your part.
You’ll need to know an awful lot of technicalities. starting from competitor scores to “Organic traffic value” and that weird jargon you normally hire professionals to understand.
Ideally, you should get started with keywords that are relevant to your area. Things like “Pizza shop in Los Angeles” should appear in the body of your website copy, if you sell pizza in Los Angeles.
Keyword optimization should be followed by website optimization, which requires even more technicalities.
Do you have a web developer friend? This is your time to call them up because there is a lot of code you should look into.
It would be easy to suggest hiring a professional – which is exactly what you should do. However, you can get started by adding some performance optimization plugins to your WordPress websites such as Cloudflare and WP Rocket.
Finally, you should start with some off-page SEO – press releases and social media marketing are some simple but very effective ways to boost your visitor count, which translates to better SEO scores.
This is a lot to add to your plate – which is why you take this weight off your shoulders directly by contacting us.
Bonus: Keep it safe with server migration
It’s tough to build a strong digital presence, but it’s easy to lose it overnight due to a hack or random punishment from Google’s algorithm.
85% of all hacks take place on small websites and independent businesses. Your chances of being hacked increase dramatically if you aren’t insured with a web maintenance service.
Also, public and unprotected servers pose a huge security threat to your website. This also includes hosting the website on your own server, which is expensive and generally seen as unprofessional due to the lower connection quality you’ll experience compared to a reputable web hosting company.
Public servers are the worst thing you can put your website into. If someone on the same server is doing something illegal or shares adult content, Google will punish you for their actions.
Furthermore, if your website were to go down on a Friday night, that is money you are losing! Public server owners often won’t be available for hotfixes and emergencies until Monday.
The solution is using a private contractor such as DVC – to look into features such as top-notch speed, which improve SEO score and user retention, and, of course, safety.
Safety is a must. An unsafe website is dangerous for your online image, and being hacked is very, very expensive.
A secret: All of this is already done for you!
But all of this is actually ready for you to just pick up and enjoy as it lands you directly on top of your goals.
You can already own a website in less than three weeks. You can also be the top restaurant in your area in less than 90 days, once you know the ins and outs of local SEO and web development.
Unfortunately, these two skills take months to develop and years to master, which is why thousands of customers flock to Digital Visibility Concepts to get a custom website they can rely on.
DVC has been building digital platforms for restaurants for over 15 years, and thanks to a perfectioned technique, our customers can enjoy the best rankings on Google and a platform that represents them.
Furthermore, they can enjoy a multi-channel approach to getting more clients – thanks to our various services, we can rely on a synergetic approach to getting them the visibility they need.
And we can do it for you too, starting today.