Rank Your Business At The Top!
Written by: Dan Alper
There are plenty of small family owned restaurants that serve amazing food that need to find creative ways to separate themselves apart from the big corporate chains that have endless marketing budgets. About a year ago, one of our clients spent valuable money building a static website with the usual pictures, menu, and contact info that worked well at attracting new clients. They positioned themselves in local listings using Yelp, Grubhub, Yellowpages, and other citation websites. Typically, these business directory listing sites make money by charging a premium to have a citation positioned at the top of a search engine results page. The minimum entry level fee for Yelp is approximately $300 per month and that doesn’t guarantee that paying this sum will insure top placement.
The problem facing our client was that they had maxed out their monthly budget for these restaurant citation websites and they needed to figure out another marketing source for attracting new clients to their location. We had one of our RankWorks marketing experts present them with a business analysis of where they were ranking organically on Google’s search result page for specific keywords. Our expert showed them results that compared their rankings to their competitors and pointed out areas for improvement.
One of the solutions that was agreed on became a game changer for the family owned restaurant and increased reservations by 30%. Sometimes simplicity creates extraordinary results and let me explain how this worked. When you type into Google’s search box the keyword “restaurants” an automated suggestion appears showing the keyword phrase “restaurants near me” and if you choose to click on this suggestion, you are shown a results page. At the top of this results page is a Google Map with pin icons listing restaurants in your geo-location. Right underneath the Google Map are three restaurant listings with a pull-down tab for “more places”. This is important because if a small family owned restaurant can appear in these listings the ensuing results would create more reservation opportunities. Furthermore, the Google local map results appear above all of the restaurant citation websites and that charge their clients a heavy sum of money each month to be listed.
The outcome was amazing. Our SEO team worked diligently to get our client listed in the organic Google map results for the keyword “restaurants near me” and the phone started ringing. On average the family owned restaurant had two seatings on their busiest of nights but since this new search result outcome they now have a third seating. Not only are their nights being booked up, but their lunch rush has improved as well.
With the increase in business, the family owned restaurant faced a new but good problem. They found it difficult to keep up with bookings and reservations with their limited staff. Therefore, our web development team came up with a practical solution for their website. We installed a reservation and seating application into their website to alleviate the bookings over the phone and freed up more time for their staff. This also had an effect from a website marketing perspective. The website was transformed from a basic static site to a dynamic site that captured leads from the reservation application. The restaurant is now building out an email marketing campaign using the reservation input data such as client name, phone number, and email address to re-market promotional meal offers. Since business is now booming, the next project that is being worked on is setting up a review and testimonial section to increase their brand awareness for their location.
If you’re a business owner and require assistance with getting your company ranked on Google ask to speak to one of our marketing experts. RankWorks is a digital marketing agency that builds brands for small and medium sized businesses by providing access to agency level services normally considered out of reach for smaller budgets.
