MenuWare - Gaining Traffic

How do I get more people on my restaurant's website?

Now that your restaurant is online, the next step is getting people to use your website. You'll get two types of visitors: those who know of your restaurant already, and those who haven't yet heard of you. You'll reach these two groups separately, so let's look at each of them.

Your Current Customers

The first group that you'll want to attract are your current customers. They will keep coming back to your site if you give them a reason to, and it's a great way to promote your new items and sales. Here are some tips to attract these people to your site:

Give them fresh content to return for. Every week, update your upcoming news, events, etc. This is the most important thing you can do to have a popular site! A stale site gives your members no reason to return.
Facilitate community. Add forums to your website, and encourage your users to discuss the community and other relevant topics on them.
Use your website address everywhere! Stationary, newsletters, advertisements, inside and outside your building, and anywhere else you can think of.

Remember that it may take awhile before your site community reaches a "critical mass". At first, only the braver users will post messages. As things become more active, more people will feel comfortable with participating. Encourage discussion by setting an example and reminding people to talk!

Your Prospective Customers

The main reason you have a website is most likely to reach this audience. But building it doesn't mean that they will just come. You need to help them find you. One very important thing to remember is that your site will not automatically show up in search results. You must submit it to a given search engine in order to be listed.

While the hints above also apply, some different ideas apply here:

Submit your site to as many search engines as possible, especially Google. Your site may eventually get found through links to it, but this could take months or years, and you can speed this up immensely by submitting them yourself.
Use the "Forums" feature of your site in order to encourage discussion. The topics they create will reflect what people care about locally, and if they're talking about the new addition to the Bayside Mall, your site will suddenly show up for searches for "Bayside Mall" and you'll be attracting a targeted audience of locals.
If you'd rather not go through the process of search engine submission yourself, we can submit your site to dozens of search engines for you. See our packages page for details.
Encourage other relevant sites to link to you. This improves your search engine ranking. Many local websites may be happy to link to your site.
Your site should have a domain name. Instead of xyzsite.menuware.com, you can be xyzsite.com, which will help with name recognition. See the "Domain/Email" item of your "Features" menu to set one up.

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