Online restaurant marketing: SEO or Adwords?

We’re talking here about search engine marketing. This is when you want your business to show up on Google when someone types in a certain word or keyphrase. For example, if you type “Indian restaurants Melbourne” into Google you’ll get a ton of results (over a million in fact), some of them sponsored (the coloured ones at the top and side of the page) and the rest “organic” (the ones that show up naturally without sponsorship). The organic results can be affected by a process called search engine optimisation (SEO).

Google Adwords

The sponsored results at the top and sides of the page are Google Adwords advertisements, paid for by businesses. The business nominates an advertising budget and chooses relevant keywords. Google makes sure their ads show up on the search results when somebody enters one of the chosen key words or phrases. The business pays Google every time somebody clicks on their ad. This is called Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising.

The cost for each click varies depending on the quality of your website (how old it is, how relevant Google thinks it is to the searcher, etc) and how much competition there is for the keywords used. So for example the keywords “Italian restaurant Bayswater” will not have much competition at all, especially if only one Italian restaurant in Bayswater is using Google Adwords, so you’d have a very low cost per click (CPC) if you were to advertise for those keywords. If you were to search for “restaurant website design” however, there are a lot of businesses who want to be at the top of the list to build your website, so the cost for each click on those keywords might be a few dollars, because there are several business “bidding” for the clicks. In highly competitive industries the cost of a single click can be over a hundred dollars!

Organic results (SEO territory)

The websites that show up in the rest of the search results, below the ads, are called organic results. Google has a very complex way of ranking these results and it keeps the inner workings of its method secret so as to avoid manipulation. There are some things that are common knowledge though, which affects where your site will show up in the results. They are:

• The relevance and frequency of the keywords on the website
• How many other websites reference your site (links back to your site)
• How long your website has been around
• How well your website runs

I won’t go into the details of each factor here because it’s not that important. My argument is that SEO is a waste of time for small businesses, but if you want to research it more there is lots of information about SEO on the web.

95% of traffic originates from the first page of results, which is why a booming industry has sprung up around SEO. Businesses pay big dollars to other businesses who guarantee to get your site on the first page of Google for various key phrases. Large companies will even have entire departments devoted to their SEO. It’s a full time job for a lot of people because it takes so much time and effort to achieve, which is why it’s so expensive to have it done well.

Just by making sure your website is well designed you will automatically be implementing some good SEO practices to have you showing up in relevant searches. The fact that most small businesses are so area-specific means that there won’t be much competition, so just by having a streamlined and completed website for your cafe or restaurant you will be ahead of your competition naturally.

Why “real” SEO is a waste of time for restaurants

I get asked a lot in this job whether a website we create will “have SEO”. Search Engine Optimisation is one of those buzz phrases that everyone has heard of and knows a little bit about, but most people don’t really understand the inner workings.

I’m going to let you in on a few little secrets about SEO. As someone who has had interests in several websites, and been engaged in SEO both as a dabbler and as an outsourcer, I can tell you that most SEO promises are actually just snake oil. Just by doing a few basic things yourself you will achieve the same results.

For starters, “real” SEO is only worthwhile if you’re at least a national company. Real, large-scale SEO, the kind you pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month for, targets an entire search engine’s domain. So in the case of Australia, an SEO campaign will target the whole Google Australia search engine. It’s impossible to just have your key words show up in a particular suburb or even city, unlike with Adwords, where you can target your ads to particular geographic locations, right down to a specific suburb.

For this reason, embarking on a paid SEO campaign is not a good use of resources for a small business like a restaurant or cafe. It’s like using a shotgun to kill a flea. Paid SEO is much better suited to companies not bound to a single location, who are trying to funnel business from a large area, i.e. nationally or globally.

SEO companies won’t tell you this though. Their sales team will tell you all sorts of stuff about why you absolutely must have SEO to be competitive. If you don’t have it you’ll probably be swallowed up by the business next door! Sure they will absolutely get you on the front page of Google for your keywords, and it will cost you thousands, but you could have done it yourself for free, because your keywords just aren’t very competitive. Just by using some basic principles which any web designer worth their salt should be doing by default, you’ll have the edge over that business next door that built their website and didn’t even do the basics to get the site ranking well on Google.

So what should you do for your restaurant online?

• Make sure you or your web designer has created an xml sitemap of your restaurant and has submitted it to Google.
• Submit your website link to your restaurant or cafe's listing on hospitality directories like Menulog, Urbanspoon, and Eatability (these all create links back to your site, which Google uses to assess your credibility). Same with Google places.
• Make sure all your meta data (page titles, descriptions, and relevant keywords) is complete. This won’t be visible on the visible page so you’ll need to check the code of your site. You can do this by pressing Ctrl-U in your browser while on your web page and examining the data around the top of the page.
• Make sure the pages of your website have a few mentions of where you are and what you do. Your visitors might take this for granted, but search engines won’t find you if you don’t tell them what you offer and where you are.
• Make sure your website is fast to load and doesn’t contain too many coding errors. This can be checked on the W3C Validator, which checks websites for errors.

An advertising experiment

Back to Google Adwords. Try this. Take your current advertising budget and use it on a Google Adwords campaign. Your ads in the local paper seem to do well? That’s great, but the world is online now. Without trying to sound harsh, a hell of a lot more people are using Google to find you than the over-50 demographic who actually reads the local paper. If you don’t believe me just take a chance and see for yourself. Spend one month skipping your local paper ad and instead put the money into a Google Adwords sampaign. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s easy to spread the same amount of money over the course of a month by adjusting your daily advertising limit.

Target keywords that people will be using to find you. Don’t be too general because you don’t want to waste money on clicks that aren’t going to bring you business. So for example, let’s say you have a cafe in Brunswick. (For people reading this outside of Melbourne, Brunswick is a fairly hip inner city suburb with a lot of cafes.) You want to get found by people searching for you, so you’d add the following keywords:

Cafe Brunswick
Brunswick cafe
Cafe in Brunswick
Cafes in Brunswick
Coffee shop Brunswick
Brunswick coffee shop
Places to eat Brunswick

A quick Google search reveals that not a single cafe in Brunswick is advertising on Google! This could just be because I'm currently about 40km away and I'm out of anyone's advertising zone, but I doubt it. A little research using Google Keywords checker (part of Adwords) reveals that the phrase “Brunswick cafe” is a low competition search term, yet is being searched for around 2400 times per month in Australia (presumably mostly in Melbourne). That’s almost 100 times per day. So if you had a mind to do it, you could spend about $5.00 a day and ensure that your cafe was at the top of the Google search results every time somebody searched for that term. At least until your money runs out every day, then they stop showing your ad. But the beauty of it is that it doesn’t actually cost you anything until the searcher clicks on your ad.

You don’t even need your own website to start advertising. You can point the ad to anywhere you want. So if you have an entry on directory sites like Menulog or Eatability, or if you have a Facebook page for your restaurant or cafe (if you don’t even have that, see our recent article, How to create a Facebook page for your restaurant or cafe), you can point the ad there. Anything to get the searcher looking at your place first. Most people stop searching at their first reasonable find, so just by being their first port of call you’ll have a big edge.

Conclusion

So we can see that using Google Adwords is very much an untapped resource for hospitality businesses. With a very small outlay you can have your business showing up at the top of searches without any competition. I’m not going to bother searching for other areas, but if Brunswick cafes aren’t advertising, there must be a lot of suburbs where there is zero competition for clicks on Google. This means it’s up for grabs – and cheap. At least until other people catch on and start doing it too.

There are lots of great free guides around about how to do set up your campaign and research keywords using Google’s free tools (ironically most of the big SEO guys use Google’s free resources to do their research because they are so comprehensive). If that’s all too much though and you don’t have the time of the patience, you can contact us about managing your ad campaign for you. We would generally charge a percentage of the campaign, and we wouldn’t take on a campaign that was for less than $50 per week ($7 per day) in advertising, because it just wouldn’t be worth the time. If you do decide to outsource your Google campaign, whoever you choose, a good rule of thumb is that you should never be paying the agency more than the advertising itself costs. So if you decide to spend $50 per week on the advertising, you should never be paying more than $100 per week total, including the fees.

Another thing you should make sure of is that if you get somebody to manage the ads for you, they present you with a report at least monthly on the progress. You should be finding out how many clicks your ads are getting, how much it’s costing per click, and what the agency is doing to adjust the campaign based on the information that’s coming in. Some advertising partners will just set up your ad then collect the pay-check each month without even checking it, let alone making changes to optimise the campaign so you get more value for money per click. It's important to try new things and see what works.

We'll probably produce a video in the next few weeks to walk people through creating their own Google Adwords campaign, so be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at the top of the page if you'd like to be notified when it comes out.

Questions? Post them in the comments section below.