How important is your restaurant's web presence?

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in 2008 over 72.5% of the U.S. population was online (that’s OVER 220 MILLION Americans), and 70% of them use the Internet everyday. This means that most of your customers are looking for restaurants online, and many of them use Google to find a good place to eat.

I don't know if you are aware that Google has recently introduced a local search feature that detects your location and shows local results instead of global ones. What this means is that, for example, if somebody wants to find a Mexican restaurant near their home, they just have to type "Mexican restaurant" in the Google bar...


...and Google will show them a list with the top 10 Mexican restaurants nearby. No need for them to even tell Google where they are located. Google knows.

Now, if you happen to own the ONLY Mexican restaurant in town, you probably don't need to worry about showing up in the top-ten list. However, chances are that your restaurant is not the only one in your category so you better start working on your web presence or people won't find you online!

In addition of showing the list with the names of the top 10 restaurants, Google also displays their websites, their phone numbers, and the number of reviews that people made. It is just one click away to read what people have to say about your restaurant:


So, OK now you get that you should show up in the Google searches when somebody looks for your restaurant’s cuisine, now what should you do to make sure that your restaurant shows up in the top-ten list?

To start, you should make sure that your restaurant has a decent website. This is a basic requirement. It is not enough to show up in Citysearch, Metaflavor or Yelp. If you’ve noticed, all the restaurants in my search have their own websites.

Also, your website should be informative and very easy to navigate. It should contain the following components:


✔ Your complete menu with prices

✔ Photos of your dishes

✔ Your location: address (with a map), and phone number

✔ Hours of operations

✔ Information about other services: catering, special events, cooking classes, etc.

✔ The option of making online reservations directly from your site (very important for many people)

✔ An online form to capture your prospect's name, email, birthdays and anniversaries (essential requirement to email them promotions and attract them to your place)

✔ Press releases, testimonials of happy clients

✔ etc.

In addition, you should promote your site so that it scores high in the Google natural search results. How do you do that? This is a whole new topic (it is called SEO) but basically you should have as many cross references to your site as possible from other sites and social networks: blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

You can sign for a free account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start blogging about your place. You can write about your dishes, your staff, your wines, or beers, about geography (country, region) and culture of your restaurant’s food or any other information that could be interesting for your clients.

Of course this blog will have links to your website. You can even link this blog so that it also publishes to your website at the same time…

Also, open a free Facebook account and populate it with content. Link it to your website. Open another one in MySpace. Do the same with Twitter and tweet away information, discounts, timely coupons, etc. Don’t forget to point people to your website as well in Twitter.

There are many other ways to promote your website. I will cover some in future blogs.

In the meantime, get to work.

✔ Google your restaurant’s cuisine and check if your website shows up in the top 10.

✔ Review your current site and start improving it with all the necessary requirements to make it attractive, useful and easy to navigate.

✔ Open an account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog. Link it to your website.

✔ If you don’t already have, open accounts in the various social networks and create your restaurant page.

✔ Open an account in Twitter (or tweet away if you have one).

Link all of your offerings back to your website and in a few weeks, check again. You should start showing up in the top 10 restaurants for your category. This is what you want. This will attract you new customers.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

http://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com