If you’re wondering if you should be writing blogs as a restaurant owner or staff member, then you’re definitely on the right track. Blogs will give your restaurant an advantage that most other restaurant owners won’t be thinking about, and will allow you to compete in a way other restaurants aren’t.
As a restaurant, your product is providing high quality food to people for events, occasions, dates, meetings and more, so visibility is absolutely vital to your success, be it visibility on the street or online. As a restaurant, you are in one of the best businesses to use blogs successfully, and writing them can give you the edge on your competition, especially if they can’t be bothered.
A while back, I wrote an example blog to show to my customers: Here’s my blog on Chicken Tikka Massala. In the blog, I go into great detail on one of my favourite dishes, which I am also happy to say I can cook quite well! It’s not the world’s biggest or longest blog, but I stick to details that are positive as it would be a dish that I would want customers to buy.
By blogging about your restaurant and the food you serve, you will start to show up more in search results and you will have what we marketers call evergreen content to post on social media. This process is all to help you rank higher in search results online, so make sure you post your blogs whenever you write them!
What Makes My Blog Effective?
This blog post wasn’t created in a single day. It required some time, effort, patience, and research. I started by researching the dish Chicken Tikka Masala. In order to convey its history with the audience and try to pique their interest, research was important. I open with a small introduction regarding the history. I don’t go too in depth on this as I want to focus on the dish, not the history, but I give enough to pique the interest of the reader. I explain the process of cooking, which doesn’t matter. Giving away secrets behind dishes doesn’t matter because people go out to eat and order online because mostly they don’t want to cook. I made sure not to provide enough information for them to make the dish themselves! If they know you are the expert, they’ll come to you because it’ll never be quite the same when they make it. The health benefits help sell it as a healthy, appetizing dish.
On a website for an Indian restaurant, blogs like this will help to show a search engine that a restaurant’s website has more information on Chicken Tikka Masala than just the menu with a small description. Due to the way search engines analyse language they can find menus very confusing, as they try to read things very differently to how we read them.
When you write a post and specify a food product, this shows that your site has information on that food product, which will help you show up if people look for that specific product locally. If you can cover your entire menu’s worth of food in blogs, it will help you raise your ranking.
At the end of each blog, you should provide a little information about your restaurant including the name of the restaurant and your location. This will help localize the content.
Recommendations to Optimize Your Restaurant Blog!
You should make sure you include the key words of the blog several times during the blog. “Chicken Tikka Masala” for example is a keyword. “Should a Restaurant Write Blogs?” is a long tail keyword, which is a little longer and more specific. When I use a long tail keyword like this a few times, it helps me find you with my blog, as you’ve found this. So when your customer looks for your restaurant and your product, you will be more likely to be found. This means more customers, more visits and more sales. Which is never a bad thing. The lifetime value of a restaurant customer can go well into the thousands if they become a regular!
Your blog should ideally be over 750 words if you’re based in a village or small town, though to compete locally in a city, I find the best amount to aim for is around the 1250 limit. This seems like a lot at first, but it gets a lot easier as you get more used to it. With a word count of 750, you’re going to be ahead of most of the competition which usually writes 50-500 words at most.
You should share your blog to social media. Social interactions help benefit the blog’s rankings on advanced search engines like Google.
Include a picture of the food, preferably taken at your restaurant. You can get great pictures with cheap cameras nowadays and even on smartphones, so you don’t need to hire a professional.
There are a lot more techniques you can use, however using these focal points, you will be able to start blogging effectively. As a restaurant marketer for around 6 years now and having worked with many businesses, I have used blogs to effectively increase traffic to sites, and I know that even blogs that aren’t fully optimized can really increase a website’s power. It just takes a few months of work. If you focused on just writing 500 words a day, at the end of a month you will have 15000 words on your site you didn’t have before. For 750 word blogs that’d be 20 detailed blogs on your products you didn’t have before, connected to your business – and if your competition can’t be bothered to work on blogging for their restaurants, that’s an exceptional advantage you’ll have over them.
I am an SEO specialist and Digital Marketer with many years of experience working in Restaurant Marketing, Legal Marketing and more! I run Ramro Synergy, Fantasoft and SECT.News. I am a business owner, and part of the team at: Grow Your Restaurant!
