Your Restaurant Invested in a Beautiful Website - Now What?

You know your restaurant needs a website.  You know that diners choose places to eat by searching the web.  You know all this, so you went ahead and invested a significant amount of capital into having a beautiful website designed.  You picked out and purchased a domain name, probably the name of your restaurant.  So how do you drive traffic to this beautiful new website?  How do you get diners to find your beautiful website, click on your carefully chosen domain name and eventually walk through your door?

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the words, "I am ranked #1 in google when you search for the name of my restaurant".  That's wonderful, but what if diners don't know the name of your restaurant?  Diners search for restaurants and bars by typing keywords into a google, yahoo, bing, etc. search.  They're not typing the name of your restaurant into these search engines unless they've already been to your restaurant or they have heard by word of mouth that they should dine at your establishment.  

Diners are much more likely to type in searches that look something like this "restaurants in Any City, Michigan" or "Michigan Asian Restaurants".  How does your restaurant website rank in searches like that?  If you have a website and a website alone, I'm guessing you don't rank as high as you'd like.

There are services all over the internet promising to get you ranked high in search engine results.  You can pay consultant after consultant to ensure that diners are finding you on the web.  You can invest countless capital trying to buy adwords or pay for sponsored advertising in these search engines.  You can do all that and chances are, you'll be pretty successful in driving customers to your site; but you're going to have to invest a significant amount of money to make these strategies work for you.

The key to ranking high in search engines in content.  Search engines browse the web for relevant, keyword-heavy content about your restaurant, your city and your industry.  Content, content, content is the key to inexpensively driving traffic to your website.  So how do you build content?  Social media (facebook.com, twitter.com, myspace.com, etc), videos (youtube.com, dailymotion.com), articles (digg.com, ezine.com), press releases, social bookmarking (delicious.com) and blogging (blogger.com, wordpress.com).

Creating a combination of all of the aforementioned media will no doubt increase the amount of content related to your website spread throughout the web just waiting for search engines to find it and direct diners to your site.  Seems pretty simple right?  What's the problem then? Time!  Anyone who has tried his/her hand at social networking and internet marketing knows that it becomes a full time job.  You end up with dozens of sites to keep track of while making sure you update your social media pages and writing blog posts.  Even then, there are articles to write, press releases to submit, photos to upload, videos to produce and the list goes on and on.

So what if you could partner with a website who did all this hard work for you?  With an enhanced listing on http://www.miflavor.com/, you essentially receive the benefits of all of our hard work.  Your restaurant will essentially receive a mini-website inside Michigan Flavor's directory of Michigan Restaurants.  Once there, your restaurant reaps the benefits of all the behind the scenes search engine optimization that is going on at Michigan Flavor.  We'll worry about getting Michigan Flavor ranked in the search engines.

When diners find our Michigan Restaurant directory, they'll find your restaurant page, complete with photo gallery, downloadable menus, a listing of your specials and events, a map and directions, a listing of your hours of operation and a description of your establishment.  Your restaurant page on Michigan Flavor has a direct link to your restaurant's website and social networking pages, automatically boosting your website's organic search engine listing, leaving you, the restaurant owner/manager, the time to do what it is that you do best, run your establishment.

To learn more about our fully searchable, interactive online directory of Michigan Restaurants, visit our website at http://www.miflavor.com/ or call 248.302.2738.  If you have search engine optimization questions you'd like to email, direct your questions tomailto:jodi@miflavor.com.  To learn more about getting your restaurant listed on Michigan Flavor, email dennis@miflavor.com.