The Caterer - April 2007 - Restaurant Internet Marketing

How can I use the internet to get more coverts?

Guy Holmes, Captivate Restaurants

The internet has become the place where the majority of people refer to when looking for a wide variety of goods and services – especially restaurants. The days of the restaurant guide book are definitely numbered, so having a good web presence is essential to the profitability of your restaurant. The first place to start is to have a good website. Its does not have to cost a fortune or be very flashy but it must be easy to navigate – giving the visitors to the site exactly what they what. Menus, photos, contact details, about us, reviews, are all important pages but more and more restaurants are taking bookings through their websites as well. By taking bookings via your website you are also taking all their contact details electronically which can feed directly into your database. It is important to stress that the booking is not confirmed until someone from the restaurant has phoned or email to confirm. The next stage after building a good website is to make sure it gets seen:

• The fast way to do this is to start a Pay Per Click campaign on Google. These are the adverts on any Google search at the very top of the page and on the right hand side. The benefit of such a campaign is that you can target the customers that are likely to visit your restaurant and also you can put a daily budget on how much you want to spend such as a few pounds. Choose Keywords that are applicable to you such as “Brighton restaurant”. Setting up a PPC campaign is very easy go to www.google.co.uk/adwords and fill out the requested information.
• Make sure your web address is on all printed materials and adverts
• List your website with our other websites such as online eating and drinking guides and tourist sites
• Make sure your website is optimized so that search engines can find it. You should avoid building the website in Flash as search engines cannot see it and make sure that your website has the correct Meta Tags – these will be the same keywords you use for the Google adwords – ie the keywords and phrases that people will use to find you. Your website designer should be able to give you more details on how to achieve this.