Use Google to Advertise Your Restaurant Online for Free
Any restaurant looking to grow their traffic would want to show up on the first page in Google search results when potential customers are deciding online where to eat. Many major restaurant brands spend large amounts of their restaurant marketing budgets to appear on Google's first page results by advertising using Google Adwords pay-per-click online marketing campaigns. For example, a restaurant brand (advertiser) may pay $2.00 or more each time someone clicks on their ad
to achieve the top ad position when a potential restaurant guest searches for “Italian restaurant Dallas”. This obviously prohibits many smaller operators from using this online restaurant marketing strategy to any great extent. What if there was a way to appear on Google results for free? There is, and Google asks you to do it.
The
Google Places is a way for smaller local restaurant brands to provide information about their
concept locations. Google Maps uses this information to better deliver more relevant findings in their search engine results. The best news is you can use this comprehensive online marketing tool to advertise your restaurant on Google for free.
Besides listing your restaurant location, you can add other information including your phone number, web address, email address to build a restaurant email marketing program, a description of your concept, what category your restaurant is in, what payment options you accept, and your hours of business. You have the option to add pictures and even video. You can also choose to provide either printable and mobile phone coupons or both. You can even track the stats on your listing. See how many viewed your listing, what actions they took, and where they came from.
Here's how to get your restaurant listed:
* Go to http://local.google.com
* Click on “Put Your Business on Google Maps”
* Sign into your Google account, or sign up for a free one.
* Click on the “Add New Business” button.
* Add your restaurant's information.
Your results will begin to appear in the “Local Business Results” map that Googlers find at the top of their search results.
For a list of other online directories and search engines with maps to list your restaurant on, read Michael Hartzell's guest post
here.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 7:21PM
Reader Comments (3)
Brian,
Thanks for the post.
There is another free service out there that gives restaurants a quick and easy way to get mobile and make all their marketing interactive. At insequent.com you can select a keyword, use their shortcode (55411) and get a mobile website all for free. When a customer texts your keyword to the shortcode they get a msg right back which links to your mobile site (auto-built for them).
So you can put the keyword in your store window and any of your other marketing to convert consumers on the go.
You will be charged only if you want to do future outbound messages to your "opted-in" customers. It is then $.01/message sent.
Most restaurants using it are getting as many as 50 keyword hits/day.
Sorry if I'm pitching but it is a great service especially for restaurants.
Mark
Mark, sounds like something restaurants might look into. While not free for all services, it does seem reasonable.
Thanks for the how-to on how to advertise businesses on Google for free. It's hard thing to come across- free advertising. I'll have to try this out.