SEO for Restaurants
Drive traffic to your restaurant, boost enquiries and reach more customers with strategised SEO and PPC
If visits to your website form a large part of your marketing goals, then it is essential for potential customers to be able to quickly and easily find your site.
Hence, being on the first page of Google's results is a must, and the closer towards the top is reflected by an increase in the volume of visitors.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important marketing strategy as it effectively tells Google that, when somebody uses a particular keyword in a search, you would like your website to be included in the results that it publishes.
However, the way in which Google ranks websites is extremely complex, and subject to dramatic changes from time to time. This makes the job of getting websites to rank highly for competitive keywords extremely difficult and time consuming.
The alternative to SEO is Pay Per Click (PPC). This is a form of paid advertising and applies to multiple platforms, both search engines and social media, such as Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc., of which Google is probably the most well known.
PPC is a much faster way of getting results, where instead of waiting months for your keywords to start appearing at the bottom of page 1 of Google, they can appear towards the top virtually overnight. However, whereas the organic listings (SEO) are technically free, with PPC the advertiser pays a variable charge to the platform every time somebody clicks on an ad. In essence you are paying a small amount for each visit to your website.
This in turn highlights the importance of having a site that is highly user-friendly. Having paid for the visit, you don't want the visitor to click away because they couldn't find their way to the page that would solve their problem, or give up because the page took too long to load.
The reason that keywords are so influential, both in PPC and SEO, is that people who haven't heard of your business won't search for it on Google/Bing by its name. Hence they will use words that describe what they are looking for. These are known as search terms.
For hotels it is common for search terms to include a location (county, town or specific area), together with the type of accommodation they are looking for, or possibly the facilities that they'd like to be able to use. This means that advertisers need to have a broad spectrum of keywords in order to attract the most searches.
The advantage with PPC in these circumstances is that it is possible to have large numbers of targeted keywords, all of which can be made to rank above the organic listings on the first page of Google/Bing's results. Conversely, because of the amount of work frequently required to get organic keywords into the most prolific positions, it limits the choice of keywords - often to just a handful.
The choice of keywords is important too. Some keywords will attract the 'wrong' traffic - people who visit your site but never buy or get in touch. The PPC solution is simple - pause the non-profitable keywords and try a different one. Yet with SEO it means starting the journey all over again.
In summary, PPC is the quickest route to the top of Google/Bing, and allows flexibility in the use of keywords. That said, the hospitality industry is a competitive market with some big players.