In our experience, there are five key marketing fundamentals that can take a restaurant from unnoticed to the forefront of the industry. Take a look at our best practice overviews and share them within your organisation to make sure you’re in the best position to see a return on investment for every marketing dollar spent.

Refining Your SEO & Website

The next pillar for successful restaurant marketing is to have a user friendly and SEO optimised website. Competing for search traffic can be done through paid ads, but also organically - which is always the best bet for delivering long term ROI and sending consistent visitors to your website.

Paying an SEO specialist to optimise your website can be an expensive undertaking (although potentially worth the cost - we’d recommend looking into this if your website is a priority for you) so we’ve put together a checklist of fundamentals to ensure that your website is optimised to deliver the best results and attract customers.

• Register for Google My Business and connect your website domain to this. Check that you’re also connected to Google Analytics and make sure that Google can access your page and sitemap. This will be crucial to increasing your domain authority and potential reach.
  
  
• Undertake keyword research to ensure that all of the keywords you’re targeting on your website and aiming to rank for are validated by search traffic. Ubersuggest is a great free tool that allows you to do this, however if you have a Google Ads account you can use keyword planner too.
  
  
• Test your website on various different display sizes and make sure that it translates well across devices. Phones, tablets, laptops and desktop monitors included.
  
  
• Take a look at your page titles and content. Is each page clear to users what they will find / can expect?
  
  
• Secure your site with HTTPS. This is key in terms of Google rankings and indicates that your site is safe and secure. Usually your domain provider will take care of this, but if not you can buy an SLL certificate yourself. Here’s a walkthrough of how it works.
  
• Update your metadata - it’s often the most neglected element of a website. This means making sure your images have keyword rich alt tags, meta-descriptions for each page (this pulls through to Google so take extra care here), page titles and page descriptions (usually back end and not visible to the customer)
  
  
• Always use H1, H2 and H3 tags for your headings, never simply bold or italics text. Headings indicate to Google what a page is about.

Having a visually appealing website that looks appealing to your customers is important, but when it comes to putting your restaurant(s) on the Google Search map, hitting these technical elements are imperative.

Here at First Table we constantly update our website content and refine our SEO to reach new people to try out our partner restaurants for the first time. And we don't charge our partner restaurants a penny. We’ve put together a guide to take you through exactly how it works. You can download it for free, without obligation, below.

An innovative marketing strategy in combination with the other four pillars of restaurant marketing will give your restaurant(s) the competitive edge to reach an extensive audience and positively impact your bottom line.

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