Good Tips: 5 Things Restaurants Can Learn From Googling Themselves
The Salty Truth of Googling Yourself
We recommend Googling (and Yahoo-ing!) your restaurant on a quarterly basis. It will only take a few minutes and can provide you with incredibly useful information.
1. Discover where your website appears in search results based on a variety of query combinations. (e.g. “oklahoma city bbq” or “[your restaurant] gaithersburg”) Is it time to optimize your website for searchability?
2. Monitor your online reputation. There’s no need to obsess over this. But it’s good to have an idea about what your customers are saying about you. This could help you gain valuable insights or generate new ideas.
3. Identify any outdated pages or versions of your site that may not have been taken down. It’s embarrassing when you’ve recently redesigned your site and a visitor somehow stumbles across your homepage from 1996.
4. Verify that wherever your business information appears online, it’s accurate. If it’s not, provide site owners with correct or missing information about your restaurant. For example, sometimes a directory listing may not list your website. Make sure it appears wherever possible!
5. You may have received some great press you weren’t aware of. Many restaurants have “News” or “Press” sections that aren’t updated nearly enough. Add links to select online press to help give a more timely feel to your site.
Bonus Tip: See who’s linking to you! Enter your url into Yahoo Site Explorer to find out what websites are linking to yours.
