An owner/manager of a restaurant or bar might well know that unless somebody is searching specifically for the eatery of choice, general search terms related to one’s establishment can be a challenge to hold in page results. Pick a city and and a generic request like “Chinese restaurant” or “wine bar” and chances are you’ll find social review sites like UrbanSpoon, Yelp and Chow.com heading the list, along with cookie-cutter directory pages that only list addresses and phone numbers. If somebody is going through the trouble of searching for a restaurant online, you know they’ll want to find menus, daily specials, photos of what to expect, and word of mouth reviews to help convince or discourage them to spend the money. If you have a website for your restaurant, you stand a good chance of visibility in search, and pay-per-click advertising can help boost your brand to encourage click-throughs, and appetites.
Pay Per Click Ads the Price of an Appetizer
Can you entice a hungry person to visit you with just a few words? One might think compared to television ads that showcase a delicious dish in all its glory, a simple text ad along the right side of Google search results won’t attraction much attention. Truth is, PPC advertising, if budgeted correctly, is more affordable than radio or TV, and can be customized to reach specific markets – so you’re not advertising beyond your physical locations. Whether you specialize in steak, seafood, or ethnic cuisine, you can create a list of search keywords on which to bid. Giving Web users the name of an actual restaurant alongside standard directory listings lets people know they can find more information with an actual source.
PPC Cooks Organically
Operate an effective pay per click campaign, whether through Bing, Google Adwords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, and you might find your organic search results improve with the keywords on which you bid. It’s no secret that the cost per click on certain words in Google comes cheaply if you are able to create a high quality score ad (that is, the landing page and ad text are relevant to the keywords), but a bit of PPC help may offer a boost to traditional results, so much that they exceed in click-throughs to your site.
PPC Boosts Social Presence
Restaurants with Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts will see an advantage in specialized pay per click programs with Facebook. Since these ads can be geographically targeted, you can select as specific an audience as you want to advertise your business. Entice visitors to join your fan page to receive discounts or free appetizers and desserts, and build trust among diners who could become regular patrons, and in turn do the advertising for you via word of mouth.
However you choose to advertise your dining establishment, don’t discount the advantages to online paid advertising.
Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local pay per click advertising and professional social media services.
