Capitalize on Increased Holiday Search Volume
November 11, 2009
People in the U.S. are beginning to research their Thanksgiving dining options online. Google insights shows that the annual spike in search volume for Thanksgiving restaurants has begun, with the highest search volume occurring in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Colorado. The top five thanksgiving-related searches are shown in the table below:
What should a restaurant do to attract these searchers? If open for the Thanksgiving holiday, post a distinct page on the website that clearly lists hours of operation, links to online reservation portal, directions to the restaurant and the menu offerings for the day. The Inverness Hotel website, The Fort and Villa Mosconi have specific pages already posted on their websites. To further market Thanksgiving dining, a restaurant could set up a pay-per-click campaign that was targeted to searchers located within their state, metro area or even within a particular radius of their location. Facebook is also a great marketing option because of the ability to add events to company pages and the powerful advertising platform that Facebook offers.
Another study, conducted by HitWise, shows that the search traffic for holiday recipes and menus is also on the rise. Consider posting a few recipes or a video of the chef preparing a holiday favorite to capture these searchers, if this material is available or can be created soon. This type of link bait can be re-purposed in social media venues; for example, a video could be uploaded to YouTube and the recipes could be posted on the restaurant’s Facebook page.
Bottom line? A restaurant needs to get creative this year and utilize all the options available to maximize holiday revenues. Taking advantage of every online venue to market the restaurant and its unique offerings is smart business, plain and simple.
Blog SEO Advice from Google’s Matt Cutts
August 21, 2009
I had the opportunity to watch an informative and entertaining video of a presentation by Matt Cutts, Google’s Chief of Spam Police and oft-quoted guru of the SEO world. Cutts was addressing the WordCamp 2009 audience in San Francisco, so his speech focuses upon using the WordPress platform for success in Google search. Contrary to the techie stereotype, Matt is a funny and skilled speaker and the video is well worth the 45-minute investment. For those of you that appreciate CliffsNotes and Reader’s Digest, I’ve culled what I found as the top five tips from the clip:
- Write about what you love – if you are genuinely interested in your topic, you will write more, the post will be of interest to your readers and the content will garner links naturally from other bloggers. So, while you run a restaurant and blog about the happenings there, maybe you also love biking, the art of Ancient Greece or needlepoint. Find a way to include your other interests into your blog posts; you will enjoy the effort more and your readers will appreciate the enthusiasm with which your content is created. Please refer to this advice after you tire of the football references in my posts come September.
- Start small (The Katamari Philosophy) – Katamari is a Japanese game whereby a small creature called a Katamari can devour small objects and as he does so, he becomes bigger and can devour bigger objects until the organism is huge. Cutts’ point is sound; in search engine optimization as well as other pursuits, start with what you know (cooking, food or restaurant management, for example) and build from that point. We practice this philosophy with SEO. We focus pages on a website for highly-targeted but less-competitive search phrases (called long-tail search terms) as well as the high-volume search phrases, realizing that ranking a web page for a very competitive search phrase will take longer than ranking for the less-utilized keywords.
- Keep your website and its platform up-to-date - This was actually a plea from Cutts at the conclusion of his talk. Most likely you have a webmaster that is charged with keeping your website or blog’s platform (such as WordPress) current, however I recommend that you ask for details from him/her as to their upgrade philosophy and process.
- Use readily-available resources to improve your blog and/or website – He recommends using Google keyword tool to identify phrases relevant to your website content and to uncover related terms that you may be overlooking. You could also use this tool to discover new, yet related, content when suffering from writer’s block. Other resources to make use of in developing content include trade publications, newsletters and other blogs. The point is that there exists a virtually unlimited amount of resources just a few mouse clicks away; use the power of the web to your advantage.
- Keep feeding your website visitors what they like – Cutts suggests utilizing your website tracker to uncover the most popular content and building upon those subjects in the future. For example, if the most popular post on the blog features a recipe from the chef, try to create a series of posts that offer recipes or a video of a cooking demo from your restaurant’s kitchen. When developing correlated content, make sure to link to other content that may be of interest to the reader, either contextually or at the end of your post.
If you decide to watch the entire video, let us know what you gleaned from Matt Cutts in the comments of this post. We’d love to know what you think!