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…
Restaurant WordPress Plugins Made Simple
When I started my company website about two years ago, my only significant website experience was with Squarespace. So when I tried to dive into WordPress, there was quite the learning curve. I spent a ton of time scouring the internet, trying to figure out how to make my site behave. I’m still not a site building expert by any stretch. But I have picked up some knowledge over the past couple years from running my own WordPress site and blog. Since most restaurant and venue operators are also not site development experts, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about restaurant plugins and how you can use them to add extra functions to your…
Is a Button Bonanza Sabotaging Your Website?
Very recently, one of my lovely blogging and email marketing clients asked me to do an audit of the copy on her business homepage and product page. I was happy to help, so I hopped over to her website to see what I could see. As the page loaded, the clickable elements began to appear…and appear…and appear. This website, while very attractive, had no less than six clickable elements “above the fold” — aka before you start scrolling down the page. And that’s not even counting the navigation menu. Holy overwhelm, I thought. I know this brand. I know their product. And even I didn’t know where to look. There…
The Easy Guide to Search Intent
Just yesterday, a client asked me to write a blog post around a certain keyword. For the sake of example, let’s say it was wedding caterer Austin*. The client currently appears on page three of Google search results for that keyword, and they want to get up to page one. Now, this company is a Central Texas wedding caterer, and they have a strong website. So a well-optimized piece of content that focuses on that keyword should be able to get to page one. But when I got started, I ran into a snag regarding that keyword’s search intent. And it was a good reminder that not every keyword is…
The Quickest Way to Lose Customers
After a sleepless night of tossing and turning, jarred awake every few minutes by the A/C roaring to life, I finally began to drift off around 7:00 AM. Then… BANG! Thunder that sounded like Zeus himself was chucking lightning bolts at the foot of the bed, and a torrential downpour like marbles pelting the metal roof. I groaned and rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on my lumpy pillow. But then the wind picked up, adding to the ferocity of the storm and whistling through chinks in the window facing the lake. “Our firewood is getting soaked,” I told Kirby, who also could not sleep. I got up…
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,…
Restaurant Website Content Ideas to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking
In a perfect world, when your customers search for “Best Thai food in town”, your wonderful Thai restaurant would pop up as the first Google result. But you and I live in the real world. And we know that’s probably not going to happen. That’s because of sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor. These sites are so huge, so regularly updated, and get so many visitors that your little Thai restaurant can’t compete with them in SEO (search engine optimization). So when people search for “best Thai food in town”, they’re going to get a bunch of results like this: The top results are all review sites. But you…
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…
Easy and Free Ways to Add Your Instagram Feed to Your Website
Instagram! Fun.Creative.Tiiiime consuuuuming. If you’re anything like me, you like to get the most bang for your marketing buck, whether it’s actual money-bucks or the even more precious time-bucks. So I like to make my Instagram feed do double duty by embedding it right here on my website’s About page. Unless you’re updating your company website often, it’s a relatively static platform. Adding your company’s Instagram feed to your website can bring a bit of the daily life of your business to your website, without requiring regular updates. An Instagram plugin or embed will update automatically, showing your most recent posts to anyone who visits your website. Exactly how to…
