You run a restaurant.
One of your responsibilities, of which there are many, is Marketing. In recent years you have invested in marketing online, like everyone else you have tried your best to:
- Maintain an up to date website
- Actively collect, and send to, a growing email list
- Keep fresh content on your facebook and twitter pages
Why the hell do you need to take time, that you don’t have enough of, and write a blog about what you are doing there? People tell you that it will help build content for your website, increase your ranking in search engines, and send more people to your website.
Blah. that doesn’t do it for you and you are right. Very few people will search for a restaurant in general, they search for the name of a restaurant most likely with the name of the city it is in next. Here is a screen shot of the analytics from my restaurant which got 1600 visitors from search engines last month. Check out the top terms:
So lets just say that consumers looking for restaurants in search engines are most likely searching for a restaurant they know about, drove by, etc. So is the time invested in writing a blog going to make a big enough difference in your search volume that it affects sales enough to justify it? Probably not in the short term, probably a little more in the medium term, and maybe enough in the long term.
But I still blog, and believe it is worth the time I put in. I blog here for my marketing company Guestfeed, and I blog for my restaurant Evenfall HERE. It is a chance to connect with my audience, and to share what we are doing. I can share each post on Evenfall’s Twitter Account and Facebook Page and include links in my emails. In effect making my social connections subscribers to my email list.
This ability to tell your story, with your amount of detail without people seeing you as an interruption, is rare today. If you are doing something good, something different, or something crazy you run the chance that the mainstream media will come across one of your posts via the social web or search engines as well. Evenfall has been featured many times because of this, I even got a gig writing for the Haverhill Gazette about local food because of it too. That all helps business right?
So SEO is nice but a blog is a much bigger marketing tool than that.
If you want help getting one going, you know where to find me. @spirocks on twitter, or spiro@guestfeed.com.
I am Spirocks on Twitter.