How to Get Your Restaurant into the Google Local Pack
If someone asked you, “Where should we eat around here?” you’d assume they intend to go out to eat sometime soon, right? Well, the same is true of Google searches for restaurants. When people search for restaurants in the area, they have high purchase intent. Either they’re hungry right now or they’re planning a meal for the near future. So you want to show up in that search! But here’s the problem: most of the first-page search results on Google aren’t individual restaurants. They’re from aggregate sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. These sites have thousands upon thousands of pages and huge domain authority. Your little taqueria may have the best…
How to Write Your Restaurant’s “About Us” Page
Staring at a blank page with the cursor blinking at you can be intimidating. I understand. I write for a living. And for some reason, it gets even harder when you try to write about yourself. That’s probably why there are so many bad About Us pages out there. They’re soulless and don’t say much. If you were to swap out the name of the company, they could easily apply to just about any business. Why write something if you don’t want to say anything? A prospective customer only clicks on your About page because they want to learn more about the company or the founders. So let’s give the people…
How Well Do You Know Your Target Market?
Let’s start with a little hypothetical here. You own a wedding venue, and you’re using your blog to attract organic traffic to your website. Good for you! That’s what I would do in your situation, too. So you’re doing a little brainstorming, trying to figure out what potential brides and grooms would be interested in that could get them to your site. You settle on a blog about how couples can save money wedding planning. You write it up, make sure it’s got some good SEO juice for the keyword “how to save money on wedding,” and wait for the visitors. Over the next couple of weeks, your blog post…
The Easy Guide To Email Subject Lines (with examples!)
Marketers really like their lingo and abbreviations. KPIs! CTAs! CTRs! IPAs! (That last one might be something else.) All this jargon can make some concepts seem complicated when really, they’re pretty easy to understand. You’re a smart cookie. You just don’t have the time to memorize a gajillion technical terms and read through 14 case studies about what works and what doesn’t. So. I’ve put together an easy, mostly jargon-free guide to email subject lines, with some handy examples right from my inbox. We’re gonna talk about The most important metric for evaluating your subject lines; A few different types of subjects; and Some best practices that you can use…
How to Share User Generated Content — And Stay Out of Trouble
Around my house, I’m known as “The Disposal.” This is because I go hunting for any bits and bobs in the refrigerator or pantry, and combine them into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster-type lunch — aka, I eat like the garbage disposal. A bit of leftover rice, ground beef, and some veggies? That’s about to be a stir-fry. Some mushrooms and scallions? Hello, omelet-city. I’m all about using what I have and turning it into something to fill the hole in my tummy — to sometimes questionable effect. User Generated Content (aka UGC) is the leftover ground beef in the fridge. You can (and should) repurpose it into part of…
Designing A Restaurant Website: Tips From A Pro
I am a millennial. And as such, I am slavishly devoted to a food item called the Avocado Toast. On their own, both toast and avocados are bit bland. But when you mush that fatty avocado goodness onto a piece of crispy toast and add a sprinkle of salt and pepper on top, some kind of food alchemy turns it into a gift from the gods. A great restaurant website is the Avocado Toast of your marketing. Your site design is the crispy toast. Excellent, SEO-focused copy is the avocado. And when it comes together, magic happens. While I know a lot about the copy side of the restaurant website,…
Get Started with Google Analytics for Restaurants
When I worked for a big local restaurant a few years ago, we did weekly meetings where we would talk about “the numbers.” We discussed F&B sales, labor costs, cost of goods, rental fees, employee turnover, and more. But one number we never dove into was our web traffic. This was entirely due to the ignorance of the executive team, including myself. At the time, I didn’t even know how to monitor web traffic, let alone what to do with the information if I had it. To put it simply, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about online marketing, and I’ve gotten better…
How Can You Get Backlinks for Your Restaurant Website?
If you’re working on boosting the visibility of your restaurant website, you’ve probably come across the term “backlink” or “backlink building” before. It’s a popular search engine optimization strategy, and it usually comes alongside a lot of talk about “writing quality content” and “providing value.” Those things are absolutely correct — when you’re in a blog-heavy industry. Marketers, for example, can get a huge SEO benefit out of a quality blog that shares tips and tricks for more visibility. But hospitality businesses — especially restaurants — aren’t often prolific bloggers. It’s just not the business they’re in. So they need to take a different approach for local search. Without a…
Restaurant Email Marketing #5: Simple Email List Management
Welcome to the fifth and final installment in my Restaurant Email Marketing Series! Here are parts 1 – 4 in case you missed them: Part 1: Build That List Part 2: The Welcome Email Part 3: Content Tips for Better Emails Part 4: Email Optimization for Better Results At this stage in the game, your email list should be growing and your marketing efforts should be thriving. Now it’s time to keep that list clean and tidy through email list management. This means we’re going to remove any email addresses that are bouncing or not engaging with your emails. It may feel counterintuitive to cut email subscribers when the whole…
Restaurant Email Marketing #4: Email Optimization for Better Results
Welcome to Part 4 of my email marketing series! Missed parts 1 – 3? Here you go: Part 1: Build That ListPart 2: The Welcome EmailPart 3: Content Tips for Better Emails Like a recipe for Gateau St. Honoré, email marketing can get complicated. There are infinite little bits to tweak and metrics to check, copy to fiddle with and images to update. That’s why I’ve broken this email series down into parts. Once you’ve begun list building, established your welcome email, and you’re reaching out to your subscribers semi-regularly, you can work on small email optimization adjustments that will get you better results. What is email optimization? It’s changing your…
