SEO for Restaurant Websites: Where’s the Love?
June 4, 2009
If you research internet marketing for restaurants you’ll likely be inundated with information about social media, email marketing, local search, and mobile marketing. We believe in the effectiveness of all of those techniques and utilize them fully when marketing our clients. However, we are a bit surprised more restaurant websites don’t take advantage of the benefits of solid, fundamental search engine optimization techniques.
SEO should be a part of the “big picture” promotion plans we refer to consistently. To put it bluntly, many restaurants are not doing everything they can to gain an edge on their competition.
Before Mindi and I recently attended the National Restaurant Association in Chicago, we sat down in front of our laptops to do a little research to decide where to dine during our visit. The first term we typed into Google was Chicago restaurant. To our dismay, only six individual restaurant websites appeared in the top 20 results, and the top three of those sites occupied the 6th, 8th, and 10th spots. Search for restaurant terms for many other major cities and you’re likely to find similar results.
Yes, the local results at the top of the page were sitting there for our perusal, and your website should most definitely be in that list. But those local results lack one important feature for folks who are a bit reluctant to wade through site after site to find what they want – and that missing element is a meta description. The handy thing about “regular” organic search results is you can read down the page and get a brief idea of what each restaurant is about without feeling like you’re doing research for your Master’s thesis.
The point is, people have different preferences, habits, and goals when researching online. That’s why the big picture is so important. When your site shows up in Search Engine results for yourcity restaurant – AND your meta description is enticing, well-written, and informative – you’re appealing to a faction of internet users who would not otherwise find you at all.
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