How you can boost your restaurant’s online presence
The online menu on search engines
According to statistics, 93% of people tend to look at a menu before going to a restaurant. If they don’t see what your restaurant offers, there is a high chance your potential customers will move to another restaurant. Putting your restaurant menu in places such as TripAdvisor, Foodetective, Google, and many others, will help you to attract potential business. Instantaneous updates and changes to your menu is made possible on Foodetective, making life that bit easier.
The format of the searchable text is very appealing to search engines. Menu management companies convert your menu into a digestible format. They then take it a step further by distributing content to all places where people are looking for a restaurant to eat. This process brings about your restaurant popping up more frequently in your customers’ search.
Besides, the online menu allows potential customers to see what they want. The search engine algorithms are built in such a way that when someone types: “pizza near me”, they crawl through all the pages to find this requested keyword. When a search engine finds your menu in PDF format, which offers this pizza, it simply pulls it to the first page of the search.
Our advice to you is to ensure that your menu is out on all possible platforms and search engines that are available to you and your potential customers. You can start with Foodetective!
Instagram is an amazing tool that can do magic for your business. Let’s see how you can benefit from this platform.
First of all, here you have all the necessary features to create your very own brand community. By sharing content about your restaurant’s story, your team’s achievements, and “behind the scenes” operation, you can create a bond with your followers. It will allow you to have people coming to your restaurant not only for food but for this feeling of belonging to the community. Important rules to remember when sharing your content on Instagram:
- Good images of food. A lot of good images of food. Ideally, your posts follow the same theme.
- Do not neglect Instagram stories. Today people spend less time on an actual post than on stories.
- Post a lot of video content. It is very catchy and can bring you, new followers. Paraphs your restaurant is going to be the next to create a viral video with million views. Videos of food are generally very popular.
- Engage with your followers. Use story features such as ask a question, poll, location tag, and others. Create posts that will compel people to comment. When Instagram sees that there is activity on your page, the algorithm will organically promote your posts, and your page can be found in the recommended content.
- Send a direct message to your new followers. Let them know that you appreciate their interest in your restaurant. You also can use it as a promotion tool, for example, offer a 10% discount to newcomers (it can be valid for a selected period).
Enhance Online Community
Your goal is to be featured or tagged in another account. Although sometimes it can be quite challenging. You need to find pages with relevant content and somehow convince them to tag you, there are still some easy ways to be noticed online:
- Collaborate with influencers. Today many influencers have an audience that is compared in size with a population of a town. Luckily for us, they are always looking for opportunities to create great content. Invite them to your restaurant and offer this opportunity in exchange for their recommendation or post on their page.
- When the product is top-quality, it advertises itself. Inevitably your customers will share pictures from your restaurant on their page, tagging you. Don’t ignore it and repost it on your page or in stories. Encourage your guests to mention your restaurant online.
- When you post photos tag as many related pages as you can. It can be food pages, foodies, gastronomy blogs…
The Power of Online Guides
A lot of potential customers spend time browsing restaurant guides and creating bucket lists with places to eat out. Surprisingly, not many restaurants are aware of it. For example, Foodetective publishes weekly restaurant guides on different topics. On our website, people can read about “Best vegan spots in London,” “Post COVID-19: not to be missed restaurants,” “Best Brunch spots” … Can you imagine how many bucket lists we helped to create=)
Right now, to be included in our guide, a restaurant simply needs to have a profile on Foodetective. It will allow us to direct a reader from our guide to your restaurant page, where he can learn more about your place. If you want to be featured in our next guide, contact the Foodetective team, and we will help you to boost your online presence.
