6 Reasons Blogging Can Benefit Your Restaurant & Bar Business

Most restaurant & bars owners use a website to display pictures of their food menu, drinks list, opening times and location.

However very few add a blog to promote their food and build a reputation in their community.

I built a website for a friend who owns a restaurant & bar and decided to add a blog to it. After looking around to see what others where doing in this industry, i couldn’t find any using blogging to promote their business.

This seems to be a missed opportunity because more and more people are using the internet to find places to eat and read restaurant and bar reviews.

You’ll find many industry type blogs which post content about different restuarants and bars all over the internet. What you don’t see is the restaurants or bars using blogging.

Tips For Restaurant Bloggers

One of the common objections i hear from restaurant & bar owners when mentioning blogging is, what are the benefits for my business?

The owners clearly want to know how a blog will help bring more customers to their restaurant and spend money on food and drink.

Here’s 6 reasons adding a blog to your website will help your restaurant & bar business:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is all about getting your website content to rank in the first 3 places of Google’s results. The more content (webpages) you have on your site, the more chances you have of getting on the first page of Google. Considering most of the traffic comes from the first page of Google’s search results, you’re at a disadvantage if you only display old static content on your restaurants website. Adding fresh images of your food, happy customers, cocktails etc to your blog posts increases traffic to your website.

Sports Updates – If your restaurant also has a bar and your show sport, then its a good idea to keep your customers up to date with the latest sports guide. This can bring in regular business for you if your customers know whats on and when its on. I’ve noticed customers that come into watch sport tend to drink a fair a bit and then eat before they leave or order take out. You’ll find people come in alone when your offer sport whereas its fairly rare to see someone eating alone in restaurants.

Newsletter – Sending out a newsletter every week is a great way to stay connected with your customers. Your newsletters will also include links to your social media pages and help build a bigger social media following. Its also a great way notify your customers of upcoming events and weekly food specials or menu changes. You can also add a link to a customer feedback form on your website and find out what your customers really think of your food and what they want to eat or don’t like.

Reviews – The more people that visit your restaurant and website, the more reviews you will get. A blog increases traffic to your website which will increase reviews. You can easily add a Trip Advisor or Yelp review form or link in your sidebar and make it easy for people to write  a review. Once you have added this form, you could write a blog posts and ask your subscribers to write a review which links back to your website.

Guest Blogging – Add a link to allow guest posts on your restaurant website and write a post about it.  This encourages customers and readers to submit fresh content based on a list of topics i have included on guest post submission guidelines. There’s nothing better than receiving ‘user generated content’ for free which offers your readers information about your restaurant from a different perspective. The content doesn’t need to be about your establishment as long as its related to the overall topic of your site.

Social Media – Every blog post you publish includes social media sharing and following buttons. The restaurant and bar industry is very social already so this works perfectly.  When your readers share your blog posts, they are shared to that persons network and increase traffic, build your brand and generate more exposure and customers for your business.

Educate – Many of the most successful businesses are known as industry leaders because they educate others in their fields. You can use a blog to help educate other restaurants in your industry and be known as a leader in your industry this way. This will also impress your customers and increase your reputation.

• Another Tip – Here’s a post i wrote earlier about how to add your website to Google Places and why you should.
• Adding a blog to your website is a great way to stay connected with your existing customers and build credibility and trust in your community.

The more content you add to your website, the bigger your social media following becomes which converts to subscribers of your blog and customers to your restaurant and bar. Building your relationship with your existing customers by keeping them informed via your blog is also another way to strengthen your brand.

Do you use a blog with your website? Or do you simply use a static website without a blog? How has blogging benefited your business?