At www.marketing4restaurants.com, we pride ourselves on helping our customers find new customers and turning them into repeat customers. We only do this for restaurant owners and every month we analyse marketing results across our customers, across their websites and across the bookings that they make. Here is our list of the most important things that a restaurant website should have:

1. Optimized for mobile: Our research shows that over 48% of visitors to a restaurant website are from a mobile or a tablet. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, you are ignoring a large part of your market.
2. Easily updated: You don’t want to be waiting for a website developer to update your website, and you don’t want to have to pay for it. You should be able to increase prices, add specials and content when you need to – quickly and easily.
3. Take online bookings: Our FREE Online Restaurant Booking System enables you to take bookings online, saving time on the phone and it captures customer details. You can manage the number of bookings and ensure you don’t get too many bookings at one time. Best of all, unlike other booking systems, the customer contacts are yours, they never get shared with others.
4. Integrate with Facebook and Twitter: Social media is an important part of most restaurants’ marketing plans, but if it isn’t integrated, social media is reaching its full potential.
5. Easy email marketing: Many great restaurants know that email marketing to existing customers is the easiest way to get them to return to your restaurant. Email marketing needs to be quick and easy as well as SPAM ACT compliant and it should be build it from your website.
6. Manage your reputation: You should seek feedback whenever you can – both on the website and after a booking. You website should collect the feedback and if it is not great, you can manage that, if it is great you can share it for everyone to see. This is great reputation management.
7. Great SEO: Restaurant SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation), is how Google knows what your business does. We have seen some websites that can’t be found in Google because they have great pictures and no SEO whatsoever. Without SEO your website is next to useless.
8. Great Analytics: You need to know how you are doing against the average restaurant website. This helps you improve your marketing.

How much should a website cost with all of these features? Our base package is just $495 with a $49 subscription. We can offer a lot more, but we have customers on this package generating 3 times more visits after moving across from websites that cost them $5,000. We’ve built a system that is builds these great websites at a cost that makes sense for Restaurant owners. If you need a new website, send your web developer the above specification and then talk to us. You will not find a cheaper quote for a website with all of the features that we offer, and best of all, you will be working with the experts in Restaurant Marketing. We tweak our websites specifically for the restaurant industry to help you find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.

Below is a quote from a web developer who had supplied a restaurant that is in a great location, with great food, but the website wasn’t optimised for mobile, had poor SEO, did nottake online bookings, did not have an email marketing engine, was not easy to update, had not real feedback mechanism, did not have comparative analytics, had poor social media integration and didn’t help them find more customers.

Make sure you get the tools you need, so your Restaurant has great marketing.  There is no point in running the best restaurant that no one has ever heard about.

---