Before I was a consultant, I built an award-winning digital marketing department for a 200+ location restaurant group. Online sales doubled, new guest transactions spiked, and average online order value increased by over 20%. This led to millions of dollars in additional revenue.  

I was able to accomplish this despite small budgets and a support staff that consisted of a single junior level employee. While it took a lot of hard work to build the foundation, I am grateful for that opportunity as I learned how to drive disruptive change on a tight budget.

One of the keys to our success is that we focused on competing locally.  We didn’t have the resources to do proactive outreach, so we focused on growing our presence wherever hungry people in our markets looked for inspiration. At the end of the day, the goal of every business is to be in the customer’s consideration set when purchase intent is highest. For restaurant owners, this means being present on sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and AllMenus. 

Every day, there are potential customers actively searching for restaurant recommendations in your area. You need to put your restaurant in front of them. Nobody is going to do this for you. 

The majority of searches related to the restaurant industry are defined as “discovery”, meaning people typically search by cuisine type or menu item rather than a restaurant’s name. It’s crucial that your menu is being distributed to all of the key sites in a format they can decipher. After all, there’s no way for Google or Yelp to recommend your famous chicken wings if they don’t know you sell them. 

Google currently owns about 90% of the search market in the United States. Local SEO is arguably the biggest opportunity area for small business owners looking to get in front of customers in their service area. For an overview of how Local SEO works and why it’s so important for local businesses, check out my article here. 

Nearly half of all searches on Google now have local intent (“restaurants near me”). To account for this, Google gives priority to local businesses by listing them at the top of the search results page. These results are referred to as “The Local Pack” and they cost nothing. This is a tremendous opportunity to get the attention of customers in your area without having to pay for the exposure. Most of these users are trying to decide where they want to eat their next meal – as a restaurant, can you imagine a better time to get in front of them?

Digital marketing is not easy, but it’s not rocket science. The issue for many small businesses is that they know they should be taking advantage of digital marketing, but they don’t know where to start. I’ve helped over 250 businesses fix the issues that were holding them back from being discovered online and I can help you. 

 Don’t leave opportunity on the table or someone else will take it.