Just because you’re running a restaurant and more worried about getting people to enjoy your food and atmosphere than subscribe to your monthly newsletter doesn’t mean you get a free pass on having a subpar website. In today’s technological world, 81 percent of restaurant patrons will look for a place to eat on their smartphone and 92 percent will look on their computers, according to Constant Contact. With these statistics floating around, you can’t afford to have a lackluster website if you’re hoping to drive more traffic to your restaurant. Here are some things you can do to make your website drive traffic to your location.
Locally Focused Content
For a restaurant, one of the main reasons for having a website is to help your potential customers know what you have to offer and where they can experience it. For this reason, having a strong local focus on your website pages will help the people find you when they’re searching for local restaurants. You can add local focus by including surrounding city or neighborhood names, zip codes, cross streets, or other localized information sprinkled throughout all your content, including your title tags, meta descriptions, and your page heading and subheadings.
A Detailed Menu
Most customers want to know what kind of food you serve before getting to your establishment, especially if they have any food allergies or dietary restrictions. Consider displaying a detailed menu on your website as opposed to merely mentioning the general type of food you serve, like burgers or Chinese. You may also want to include dietary information along with the price for each dish. However, make sure that all of your choices for what to include on your website’s food menu coincide with your brand identity.
Appetizing Photos
Everyone loves a good picture of food, especially if they know they may have the chance of eating that delicious food in the near future. As a restaurant owner, your food is your livelihood. The best way to get people excited about coming to your restaurant and eating your food is to show them what they’re missing. According to HubSpot, images are processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text. To get the message across, you’ve got to include high quality images of your food creations all over your site.
Online Reservations or Order Forms
When the above tactics come together, you’ll have a restaurant website people will love; especially if you include online reservations or online ordering. According to this blog post from Restaurant Den, “Having an online ordering system could add a huge boost in sales, if you’re the kind of restaurant that is marketed towards takeout and delivery orders. It cuts the middle man and gives your customers the power to DIY order.” On top of this, using these forms can also help measure just how successful your restaurant’s website is by tracking goal completions in Google Analytics.
A food-driven website is just what consumers in today’s society thirst for, and the tips mentioned above will help to make you the thirst-quencher. If you think you’ll have trouble implementing these features on your website by yourself, search out a industry-specific web design company that can assist you in making your restaurant’s website all it can be.