If you’re like me, then you love to eat and if you love to eat, then odds are your eyes greatly influence whether or not you get hungry after not having eaten for a few hours.
A good friend of mine owns a restaurant and recently inquired as to some ideas he could try for some solid, but cheap, advertising for his small local establishment.
His restaurant has a buffet and he was thinking about printing out some flyers and placing them in the doors of the neighborhoods behind the restaurant.
Now, I wouldn’t say that his idea was a bad one by any stretch of the imagination, but I told him that I think we should launch and optimize a website for his restaurant and that is what we did.
Restaurants are so easy to advertise online, especially because of the fact that they provide a basic necessity, food.
What’s really cool about food is the fact that people need it every day just to live! With that in mind, you are guaranteed to get some search traffic if you simply build a website describing your menu and including your physical location.
Here is what we did.
We launched a website and dedicated individual pages to all of the main facets of the restaurant itself.
The pages we added to it included the following:
A greeting or home page. Immediately upon arriving at the home page or main index, you immediately see a picture of the restaurant. This is very important, because we wanted our website visitors to have an immediate mental image of the restaurant itself so that they would recognize it and not miss is or drive by it and not be able to find it.
We also made the address to the restaurant obvious and in large font with a link to the map page so that any visitor could easily find the establishment.
Additionally, on the home page, we wrote a nice greeting detailing the restaurant itself as well as the types of dishes and cuisine that a visitor would find there.
Next, we added a page dedicated to his all-you-can-eat buffet which is actually the main item he sells at his restaurant.
Just as a side note: I monitor his keyword activity and he get plenty of traffic daily through a variety of keywords based around the keywords “buffet” and the city name. Works great!
We also added one giant menu page that details each and every dish on his menu. Google absolutely loved that page because of the fact that it contained tons of words and keywords that were distinct to his genre of food. Google immediately assigned trust and rank to that page simply because of the content it contained.
Then, it goes without saying, that we added a contact us page so that people could contact them for take-out or to place large orders or to make inquiries with respect to the menu itself. It was after the fact that we realized that having a well thought out and highly descriptive menu page was worth its weight in gold especially since English was the owners second language.
During the design process, I convinced the owner to add a blog to the site, so that days I visited the restaurant, I could take a snapshot of the meal itself with my smartphone and then blog about it later on his site blog. This was a great way to get highly targeted and localized traffic to his site and then to his restaurant.
Finally, we added a self updating coupon page where visitors to the site could print a coupon out, come to the all-you-can-eat buffet, stuff themselves, and then get a dollar off.
All in all, I would say that his site was a success. He got a great deal on it because he is my friend, otherwise it could have cost him thousands of dollars. If you own a restaurant, I highly recommend launching a website for your restaurant and using it as an online menu and waiter of sorts. It works absolutely great.
If you don’t have thousands to spend on one, you can always try to do it yourself. Its really not that bad. If you’re interested, check out “The Beginners Guide To Launching, Optimizing, and Promoting A Small Business Website“. Its perfect if you’re the adventurous type. Additionally, if you purchase the guide, you get free tech support if you get into the inevitable jam.
