Having a Mobile Friendly Restaurant Website is more important than ever for Restaurant Owners.  Google has announced that it is about to release a large update for the way that it collects and presents Search Engine results for mobile users.

Google is changing the algorithm for mobile search rankings, giving mobile friendly websites a higher ranking when people are searching from a mobile.   This is going to make a huge difference for Restaurant Owners, with some being big winners and some seeing a big decrease in traffic for their websites and the number of customers they receive.  Google has stated that “This will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”

Mobile Friendly Restaurant Websites will become much more important.

For many Restaurant owners, there will not too many things they need to do, for instances many WordPress sites are already mobile optimised, but everyone should be checking to see what the impact is for their business.

To help you better understand and prepare for the changes, we have prepared a list of 4 things you can do to prepare for the changes.

1.  Ensure that you website is mobile friendly.

Google make this very easy to do.  Go to the Google Mobile Friendly Test page and enter your websites URL.  It gives you a report 10 seconds later about whether or not your website is mobile optimised or not.

2.  Use Google’s Pagespeed Insights

If your Restaurant Website is not Mobile Friendly, check out Google’s Pagespeed Insights.  This generates a report that you can give to your web developer on what needs to be fixed.  This can be forwarded to your Web Developer.

3.  Rich Snippets

Make sure your web developer has enabled Rich Snippets.  These feed extra information into Googles Search Engine Database which it uses to populate the Search Engine Results Page.  Have information like your Address, Opening Times and Reviews marked up means that this information can be show on the results page.  Google has even added in photos from the website.

4.  Make sure you have a Google MyBusiness account set up

So this isn’t strictly for Mobile Friendly Restaurant Websites that we know of, but I think it highlights the underlying intention of the changes that Google is making.  Google MyBusiness is a part of the way that Google’s accumulates data about your business.  Make sure that your account is set up and activated.  Onc set up, Google will send out a postcard with an activation code.  This activation code is what confirms your address and helps Google work out which businesses are legitimate and which aren’t, so we think it is a really important part of the process, particularly when you think about the increasing number of people who are using Google maps to search for Restaurants.

5.  Ensure Phone Numbers are set up for Click to Talk

Having a Mobile Friendly Restaurant Website is not just about making sure that it looks good on a mobile phone, it is also about what people can do on a mobile phone.  If someone wants to call to make a booking, you should make sure that you phone number is highlighted as a clickable phone number.  This makes it easier for your customers to contact you and make a booking.

6.  Test and Measure!

After the changes, keep checking your web analytics to see if there has been a drop or increase in traffic coming to your site.  Hopefully, you will see an increase, which should lead to more people coming into your restaurant, but if not, make sure you fix up the problems that you may be having.

If you don’t have a website, or your website is not optimised for mobile, check out our packages.  We have the most best performing Restaurant websites at a price point that makes sense for Restaurants.

All our websites are:

1. Optimised for mobile straight out of the box;
2. Designed for you to make changes to them quickly and easily – no waiting for developers to make changes and charge you;
3. Work with our Free Online Restaurant Booking System and our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System.
4. Integrate with Facebook and Twitter;
5. Handle customer feedback. You can publish the great feedback and deal internally with the not so great feedback.
6. Build your database;
7. Run automated email marketing campaigns; and
8. All have great SEO, by the team that went to Silicon Valley to visit Google’s search team. We know SEO!

If you need help with your website today, please contact the team at Marketing4Restaurants, because you don’t want to have the best Restaurant that no one has ever heard of.