Boosting Restaurant Revenue: Part 2 of 10
Boosting Restaurant Revenue:
Part Two (of 10-part series)
PART TWO: “SEO and Getting Found Online”
All throughout human history, the most important source of information was “the personal source”. Today, the Internet has surpassed every other referral source in terms of importance to the modern day consumer (seriously, someone did a scientific study of it and TA DA – 10,000 years of evolution of human communication irreversibly shifted in a decade).
[Before we dive in much deeper into the subject of SEO, you may want to watch this video on “How Web Search Works”]
Getting found online today is another one of those “mandatories of marketing™”. The acronym all too often thrown around by the marketing industry’s version of snake oil salesmen is “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization). What does it mean? SEO is about systematically winning the favor of Internet search engines (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) and having them reward your site with top placement. Above the millions of web pages that were deemed relevant, yours was deemed most relevant. Now sure, you want to show up high – and probably do already – for what’s called a “vanity search” (which is when a company or person does a search for their own name), but what about those other really important phrases like your trademarks, your signature items, your catering division, the name of your new rock star chef recently recruited away, and all of those other phrases like “Orlando Sunday Brunch”, etc?
The goal with SEO is to leverage the power of online search and influence of the Internet to drive more traffic not just to your website, but more importantly – to your restaurants. For an independent restaurant the phrases to optimize for are pretty straight forward. For chains, it is important to optimize not just at a corporate level, but on a unit-level too. “Search” is increasingly about geo-targeting. Each location needs to be optimized for what’s unique to that location. For example, Morton’s shouldn’t just optimize for their name, but for “Morton’s of Orlando” and even more specifically profitable unit-level phrases like “Orlando Steakhouses” and “Orlando Steakhouses with Private Dining”.
You may also hear another acronym thrown around for SEO’s cousin – SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM is the online marketing world’s new and more appealing name for PPC (Pay Per Click). Think of it this way – SEO versus SEM is kind of like Public Relations versus Advertising; one you earn and one you buy. For those with big budgets and expectations for almost immediate results, SEM is the go-to tool for instantly boosting an online presence and driving traffic to your website (or promotions). Often, with SEM, you only pay for performance – which is where the earlier name of “Pay-Per-Click” came from. With the proliferation of online marketing strategies, tactics, and methods for building an online brand, the industry coined the new phrase SEM (both because it sounds better but also because it is more reflective of the fact that there are many other choices to marketing online than just buying pay-per-click ads on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. For the purposes of this article though we’re just looking at SEO (more to come on SEM in the future).
We recommend to clients that they do a two-pronged approach that includes both SEO and SEM. SEM allows a new site or restaurant company new to building an online brand get some immediate traction and build traffic. SEM is costly though. While you often pay for performance, the little charges add up very quickly. Over the long-term, if you build your SEO program effectively, you can reduce costly online advertising and pay per click to advance up the search results organically.
While the major search engines change their algorithms daily, there are a few timeless principles to consider for SEO. By the way, there are two types of SEO campaigns – one called “White Hat” and one called “Black Hat”. The first is the “good” way to win the favor of search engines and the latter is the sneaky stuff cheaters use to try and shortcut the search engine algorithms. We advise to only use “White Hat” approaches. Below are just a handful of the 100+ factors that play in to search algorithms:
1. Domain – The name of the domain plays a big part in how well you do for certain phrases. For example, since my name and domain are the same, when you type in “Aaron Allen” in the search box you will find that www.aaronallen.com shows up in the top spot. This didn’t take much effort. There were few competitors (although I was surprised to learn how many more people there are in the world with my same name – I grew up thinking I was the only one). Building up the new domain for other phrases though (like “Restaurant Speaker”) take more effort. Other SEO tools must be employed (like a long tail URL which includes the keyword in it; for instance, the page www.aaronallen.com/restaurant-speaker has the keyword phrase in it which helps with the “domain” part of the algorithms. This SEO technique is often referred to as “long tail URLS”). For each phrase you want to rank high for, build a dedicated page with the term in the URL extension.
2. Domain Registration – The length of time you register your domain is important. There was a rash of domain owners that would register a domain for the minimum length and build “link farms” and other “Black Hat” schemes and then once caught shut down the sites. Therefore, many of the search engines check to see how long the domain was registered for and reward those who paid a few years in advance (the maximum length is 10 years advance). Make sure your domain is booked at least 3-5 years out. In addition to how far out you register the domain, the original date of registration matters too; older domains have favor.
3. Page Title – The URL of the page is important but it is also important that you name the page for the phrase you’re going after as well. A page title is like the title of an article in a magazine; it should tell you what the content is all about.
4. Title Tags – The headlines and sub-headlines you use in the body of the page you are optimizing also count. These are often called h-tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) referring to the big/bold font you use. Just as on paper, when you put things in bold, underline them, etc, you are communicating that it is important to the reader – the search engine “spider” is reading the page too, just using the hidden language of computer code.
5. Keywords – The keywords can appear both in the actual copy and also in what are known as “meta tag descriptions”. The way I often describe this is to have you imagine that the search engine is an employer. This employer pays “spiders” to crawl the Internet all day and night. Each search engine may have millions of these spiders employed. The reason why when you type a phrase in to Google and get 11 million results in a fraction of a second that it can deliver so many so fast is that it already knows the answer to the question. Meaning, for any phrase, Google had its spiders find the results months ago and the answer is just waiting there for you to ask a question. So how do the spiders know what to rank high? Well, taking the analogy further, think of all these 100+ search engine factors used in a search engine’s algorithm as “spider food”. Some of the food “tastes” better to the spiders than others. The more “food” you put out there, and the better tasting it is, and the more often you put it out there, the more you train those spiders to come to your site expecting tasty food and the more they brag about you to their employers – the search engines. In other words, put lots of quality content on your website frequently – just like you’re trying to turn a stray cat (or search spider) into a pet. Okay, all of that to say, “keywords” are really tasty “spider food”. So tasty in fact, you can’t feed them too much (or put too many keywords) on a single page or you’ll make them sick. Limit keywords. Focus on one per page and don’t “stuff” the page (or overuse keywords).
6. Image Tags – Spiders can’t see images. While photos, videos and “flash” on a webpage look great to the human visitors, the spiders are reading the page differently. Think of them as reading your site in Braille. They “crawl” over the site and read the code. Some website designers will haphazardly use weird file names for the content they put up when a simple technique of naming the images the same as the phrase you’re optimizing for could make a big difference. For instance, on your “Sunday Brunch” page you’re trying to climb up the engines with, instead of using a file name like “image91211.jpeg” just renaming it to “Allens-Seafood-Restaurant-Sunday-Brunch-Panama-City.jpeg” can give you a big boost.
7. Inbound Links – When other sites link to yours it gives you a nice boost. Both the quantity and quality of the links matter; but between the two quality matters more. By quality, I mean that the search engines give a type of credibility score and if the other websites that link to yours have high credibility (i.e. you get a link to your site from the Wall Street Journal; you are listed on a site review site voting for best Sunday Brunch and get lots of links to your Sunday Brunch landing page; etc); and also all of the other factors above – if the sites linking to yours do all of the above (and a whole lot more) right, that increases the quality of the link and therefore your score for this aspect of SEO performance.
The above list is very limited due to length, complexity of the subject, and modern day attention spans. If it is any indication of how much is involved in all of this, I do a full eight (8) hour workshop on SEO and barely get to all of the big stuff. The Internet is growing at such an incredible rate of geometric progression that the methods for getting a single webpage to stand out among the billions of other pages on the site has become a specialization within a specialization.
This brings me to one of the important points on the subject of SEO. Many restaurant executives and marketers (understandably) don’t have the time to become experts at SEO and farm it out and think it’s being taken care of by the agency. Often the company that designed the restaurant website says “we are going to do some SEO as part of the design and submit your site to all of the big search engines”. This sounds like it’s “handled”. The area of design and digital marketing has become so complex though that it requires distinctly different specialists to build a modern day restaurant website and SEO program. Some restaurants have one jack of all trades build the whole thing. In actuality though, usually the best “designers” are not the best “programmers” – and vice versa. And in all likelihood, while both may know a little about the other’s job – and think they know about SEO – it is such a complex, competitive, specialized and important area of marketing that it often requires more than what the typical designer or programmer can bring to the table. For the big brands out there they often have teams of SEO specialists which are totally separate from their SEM specialists.
Okay, that may have overcomplicated what I was trying to say. The main point is that good SEO – like a good public relations campaign – is about consistency of effort. It’s not really a “set it and forget it” aspect of marketing. That said, if you stick with it, you can earn those really top spots in the search engines and win swarms more customers than your competitors. And once you get those top spots, it’s really hard for a newcomer to knock you off the top. The search engines make it hard to climb to the top; which is challenging when you’re just starting out but terrific when you rise above the competition.
Don’t let the complexity of this scare you away from learning more about it though. Keep in mind this is just a single article on a really big subject. The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Likewise, SEO is something you can learn just a little about each day. Don’t be intimidated by it. Gaining just a basic understanding and applying a few simple techniques can really pay off for restaurant companies of all sizes. SEO is like planting a garden – you need to start before you’re hungry, but it’s never too late to start and will almost certainly pay off in the long-run if well-tended. One thing is for certain though – It is essential to be found and interact online and SEO is the center of online marketing.
Additional Resources:
The First 5,000 Days of the Internet
Restaurant SEO: How Search Works
FourSquare for Restaurants
BOOSTING RESTAURANT REVENUE PART ONE
BOOSTING RESTAURANT REVENUE PART THREE
BOOSTING RESTAURANT REVENUE PART FOUR
