Is your website deserted ?The Marketing4Restaurants team see a lot of restaurant websites and we see the number of bookings that those websites take for Restaurants (our Free Online Restaurant Booking System is the largest online booking system for restaurants that is free for them for unlimited bookings!) We know what makes a great website that brings in the bookings and we know the restaurant websites where you can watch the tumble weeds roll by and hear the crickets in the background.
If your online marketing isn’t drawing 1,000 visitors per month to your website, you could be losing diners to your competitors.
Too many times we see Restaurant owners spending a fortune only developing the best looking website, only to wonder why their traffic hasn’t gone up and why the restaurant is not busier. They look at their competitors and see ordinary websites, but what they don’t’ see is incredible content and great SEO, which is bringing in the customers. We have some customers with average looking websites who take 500 or a 1,000 seats per month in online bookings. These are restaurants that are full at 6PM on a Wednesday night!
Great photos by themselves will generate zero extra traffic. We’ve spoken of the dangers of websites without any text for Google to index in our blog article “Can a free website cost hundreds of thousands of dollars” Without the text, you are forced to do marketing to drive people to your website. This is completely the wrong way round. A website is a magnet for attracting new customers in every day, if it has the right content.
You don’t want to have the best website that no one has ever seen!
Without the right content, the right text and the right SEO, that is what you will have, a website that no one will see.
Online Sales and Online Marketing for Restaurants.
The content on your website does the marketing and the menu and photos do the selling. The text helps Google send you traffic from people who haven’t heard of your restaurant, but are interested in eating there. The content on your site creates the Search Engine Optimization and that is what helps search engines to refer you new traffic. It is then up to the website to sell them on your restaurant. What does the selling? A couple of things, the location, the menu, the prices, and the food. How do people experience food on a Restaurant Website? They will see it on the menu most often – often there are no photos on the website, which is a big opportunity lost, because great photos can make a huge difference in your conversion rates.
Great photos do the selling – particularly great food photos. Your website has people looking at it every day (hopefully!), so you need something to make them stop and think “That is what I want to eat. I am going to make a booking today and I am going to eat there.” Getting great photos isn’t difficult. Here are some samples of food photos we took at our favourite Chinese restaurant – Golden Orient.
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Don’t have great photos? No problem, check out our blog on great ideas on how to get some awesome photos for your restaurant.
The average website receives around 1,000 visits per month.
Check your analytics today and work out what you are getting. Many Marketing4Restaurants customers see a 50 – 100% increase in web traffic over 6 months and some with particularly poorly designed websites can increase by a factor of 10.
If you don’t have great SEO, your competitors with great SEO will be picking up your customers!
There are lots of other ideas for content for your website. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for more ideas on how to find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.