Fast Food is Fast Enough…
October 5, 2009
Every once in awhile, a title strikes me as so utterly ridiculous as to elicit a spontaneous guffaw, and I’m not a big guffawer – at least, I don’t think I am. Five words lept out this morning from a Google Alert I had set for online restaurant: “Fast Food is Faster Online”. Um, what? …Seriously?
Quote: “How many times have you stood in front of a fast food counter and end up gawking at the mega-sized menu attached to the wall?” Um, what?…never? …Seriously?
I don’t come close to frequenting them, but I do have a fairly solid idea of what each place has to offer, and their menus haven’t changed enough (at all?) in the last 20 or so years to stump me and leave me gawking. If you have to ask someone what a Big Mac or a Whopper is, chances are you don’t eat at those establishments in the first place. At all. Ever.
And it really needs to be faster? That seems about one step past the edge of rational, at least to me. I get the whole time management thing, and if I’m in the mood for a little take-out, I call ahead to save myself that ten or fifteen minutes. But fast food? I’d guessing the mean wait time in procuring a chicken sandwich from Wendy’s is probably about two. Do we really need to clutter technology and the Internet even further to save ourselves two minutes? Or are we now attempting to scrounge new ideas from the depths of insanity because all of the cool applications are already spoken for?
Bit out of hand. Just my two cents…
Who’s Looking For You?
October 1, 2009
We’ve been saying here for months that people are looking for restaurants online; it’s estimated that anywhere from 60% – 80% of diners do some form of online research prior to selecting the restaurant at which they will eat. Who are these searchers? Where are they located? What are they seeking? We’ve been doing some in-depth research to get you those answers and more.
A quick look at Google Insights shows us that, of Google users searching for restaurants, the following are the top metro regions where these searchers are located:
What are those searchers typing in to their browsers? Google reports the following as the top 10 restaurant-related searches (remember, these are strictly Google numbers, exclusive of any searches on any other search engines.)
Because the data provided above is very Google-centric and because of the variants involved with each keyword research application, we have compiled specific keyword data utilizing multiple keyword research tools that include the most popular subscription-based and free public tools available to search engine marketers. The findings are enlightening to anyone involved in marketing a restaurant.
The following lists depicts the top metro areas in the U.S. that have logged the most restaurant searches in the top search engines over the past 12 months. Each successive data column to the right of the metro area shows the ranking for that keyword phrase in the keyword research tool listed in the header row of that column. The final column calculates the average ranking in each of the four utilities. We use the average ranking to determine the restaurant search phrase that is utilized the most across search engines.
What are the takeaways from this research? If you own, manage or market a restaurant in any of the cities listed in the table above, you should strongly consider preparing a search engine marketing strategy to place your restaurant in front of these searchers. That strategy should include search engine optimization, local search optimization as well as a thorough review of the restaurant website analyzing design aesthetics and usability.