How a Website Helps Your Restaurant Compete to The Best of Its Ability

People are looking for your website. Do you have one? If you do, what does it say about your restaurant? Can people find you in the search engines for the terms you think you should be listed under? If they can find you, are you giving them what they’re looking for when they visit your website? These are all questions that you need to address when you consider the online presence you want for your restaurant.

We live in an information based society. With the explosion of the internet, people can get information about anything, anytime. People no longer hope they can find what they are looking for online, they expect to be able to find what they are looking for online. With that being said, it is amazing how many restaurants still don’t have there own website, or at least one that people can find. There is already information about your restaurant available online, whether you have provided it through your own website or not. Without a website you are leaving the responsibility of informing your customers to someone else.

If your customers can’t find your website, or you don’t have one, people researching their restaurant choices on the internet will simply search out another restaurant. There are more choices in the restaurant business than nearly any other industry. In a competitive market like that, you certainly can’t afford to disappoint customers that are actively searching out your restaurant by not making your presence available to them. Not only are you turning away interested customers, but without a website, new customers have no way of discovering you online. In a society that is moving towards using the internet as the number one research tool, that is a dangerous road to travel.

If you are one of the skeptics about the effectiveness of a website, don’t fall victim to the line of thinking that people aren’t searching for your website. For example, one restaurant we have built a relationship with has a website that we track visitors to. As I write this there have been 762 unique visitors and 2487 individual page loads on their site in the past 30 days. That’s an average of about 25 unique visitors and 83 page loads per day. Of those visitors, the majority of them were referred to the site by searching for the name of the restaurant in a search engine. Others came from search terms like “Best restaurant in (the city name)” or “Wolf Blass Platinum Label”, a wine that happens to be in their wine list. The point is that people are looking for information specifically about your restaurant whether you have a website or not. You owe it to yourself to provide those interested people with the information they are looking for.

The best part about the internet is that you can provide your customers with more information about your restaurant than they would ever need, and it costs you less per month to host a website than placing a single radio ad. For as little as $20 a month, you can host a website that you can easily make changes to yourself. A domain name will run you about $8 per year. You’d be hard pressed to find any other medium that allows you to access as many people as the internet does at a cost that low.