How to Turn Your Restaurant Website into a Silent Salesperson

Need to fill seats in your restaurant? Your website can be your silent salesman.

You have a fantastic theme, an amazing menu and wonderful ambiance for your restaurant, but you feel like there is more that you can do to enhance your exposure and boost your business.

Traditional forms of advertising and word-of-mouth certainly are wonderful ways to get the word out about your restaurant, but if you really want to attract attention, you need to have a website.

The World Wide Web is what the general public relies on the most to find out information about topics of interest – including places to eat. If you don’t have a website for your restaurant, you are doing yourself a disservice. But, the success of your marketing efforts via the World Wide Web requires more than simply building a website and hoping that it will draw more attention to your business.

If you want to get the most out of your site, you need to put some effort into it. With the right tactics, you can literally turn your site into a silent salesperson for your restaurant.

How can you successfully go about boosting your success with your website? Here are some relatively easy, yet essential tactics that you must employ.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In the world of Internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is central to the success of a website, and in turn, the success of a business. SEO refers to the process of improving the visibility of your website on various search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Bing.

When a web surfer types in a specific word or phrase into a search engine, the search engine will list those sites that they believe are the most relevant and authoritative at the top of the results. These results are natural, or ‘organic’ and they rely on a number of factors, including the content of a website and the amount of links that lead back to a specific website.

Beyond the basics of SEO, local SEO is important for restaurants. Here are more ways to grow your restaurant with mobile and local strategies.

Update Your Content

As was mentioned with SEO, the content that is placed on your website is an important part of SEO. The more regularly your content is updates, and the more relevant it is, the more valuable the search engines are going to find your website.

That said, the more content you post to your website, the more ‘fresh’ it will appear, not only to the search engines, but also to your targeted audience.

What type of ‘fresh’ content should you feature on your site? Blog posts related to recent or upcoming events and additions to your menu are a great start. You can also add new pictures of your menu items, or display images of a recent event that you hosted. You can even post videos that showcase your restaurant; the chef whipping up a meal or a bartender illustrating how to make a drink, for example.

The key to success with adding new content is posting relevant information that relates to your business.

Build Links

Links are another important component of SEO, but more than that it’s about traffic to your site (future customers).

Build links back to your site by adding blog posts, articles or images on other related websites that contain a link back to your website.

Thanks to this approach, you will drive more traffic to your site from visitors to other relevant sites.

This is a fantastic sales building tool for your business. It’s the first step to introducing your restaurant to customers.

Post on Social Media

Food photos are always hits on social media sites.

Don’t forget to make use of social media. There has been tons of talk about the beneficial effects of social media on the success of business websites; and restaurants, in particular.

Create a Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest page for your restaurant. Just like your website, though, make sure your post to your social media profile frequently, including photos and status updates that will capture the attention of your targeted audience.

Closing The Deal

Once you get new visitors to your website it’s the job of your silent salesperson to close the deal.

Your fresh content will do part of the job. Visitors want to see that you’re up-to-date and active. That starts building trust.

Action Step #1: Include lots of appealing and updated photos of your food and drink. People are very visual and many people shop for restaurants with their eyes by looking at photos instead of at descriptions (but both are important). (tweet this)

Action Step #2: With your content, answer all the common questions that your customers ask in person. Answering these questions on your site is exactly what happens in a real life sales situation. (tweet this)

Action Step #3: Videos are now an important element in website sales especially with mobile. Videos can showcase your food and drinks and do the final convincing. (tweet this)

Action Step #4: Finally, share your story. Every restaurant has a story and while people buy from your business they are really buying the story and the people behind it. (tweet this)

Your website can do amazing things for the success of your restaurant. Use these tactics and it will truly act like a silent salesperson for your establishment.

What ways are you using your website to enhance the success of your business? We’d love to hear about your efforts and your successes.

Photos by jenny downing and Janine