- Share recipes
- Cooking guides and videos
- Offer a wine pairing guide (link this back to the wine and food you offer)
- Help spread the word about local events
- Review items that you use as a business
- Showcase your reviews / testimonials
Share recipes
These recipes don't have you be the ones you use, after all we don't want to give away any secrets! People are always searching for recipes online, the great thing about this is that people search for basic recipes all the way up to advanced recipes.
Top tip #1: Put lot's of effort into taking high quality beautiful photography.
Top tip #2: Plan ahead for seasonal recipes, try and create blog posts targeted for seasonal events like Halloween, Christmas and Easter. The great thing about this is that you can create the blog post once and reap the rewards every year because people will always be searching.
Cooking guides and videos
This next tip can be paired nicely with our first tip - sharing recipes. Reading a cooking guide or recipe is great but a lot of people would rather learn through watching videos and following along. You can easily add your video onto your blog post.
Top tip #1: Host your videos on YouTube as its classed as the second largest search engine in the world. This can help people find your blog post and help you share it.
Top tip #2: Transcribe your video so Google and other search engines can pick up on the wording which will help with ranking your blog post in the search results. You can do this yourself or pay a small fee for someone else to do it.
Offer a wine pairing guide
Wine tasting and pairing is a big thing! Get yourself a slice of that cake and help spread the knowledge in your blog posts.
Top tip #1: You can focus parts on some of the dishes and wines that you offer in hope to bring more people into your restaurant because they are now hungry and thirsty! If you use online booking then add a button there to help entice them.
Top tip #2: You can either target specific wines in each blog post or you can create a sort of "mega" guide which targets lots of different wines and offers lots of different tips.
Help spread the word about local events
It can often pay by giving a little back to the community. To help drive traffic to your website then why not create posts about local events. This can help bring people to your website if they are looking for event specific information.
Top tip #1: Share these event posts on social media in the hope that people will interact with you and visit your website.
Top tip #2: If you visit the event then follow then up on social media with some pictures, nice words about the event and make sure you tag in the events social media accounts. They will often share your posts and this can again, help people interact with you online.
Review items that you use as a business
This is a great opportunity to drive traffic to your website. This kind of blog post can often attract back links. Back links are links to that blog post from other websites, Google uses these as a ranking signal to help determine how good and popular that page is. This can have an effect on your website overall and help you out do local and regional competition in the search results.
You can review a knife that the chefs use (something branded not just any old blunt object!) or perhaps you use some booking software on the computer. These are all things that people can potentially be searching for.
Top tip #1: If you review the booking software for example and you find that certain things are hard to do or just a pain then write about them too, mention this and how to get around it. This can help you target people that already use that booking software but are having issues with it.
Top tip #2: If you review a product, such as a knife then you could potentially be an affiliate for that. An affiliate blog post is one where you offer the user a link which lets them by the product (Amazon for example) and you get a cut (say 5%) of that sale. If your review is of high quality and people find it useful then you might make quite a nice earning on the affiliate sales.
Showcase your reviews / testimonials
I know that myself and many others like to look at reviews before going to a restaurant - after all, who wants to eat somewhere that has a rat infestation or doesn't live up to the food hygiene rules / laws. Having some great reviews on your website can really help people decide if they will come to your restaurant or not.
Top tip #1: You can pull in reviews from other services such as Facebook, Google Business and Yelp. This can help you if you do not have any direct reviews (left physically at the premises or perhaps a letter written to you).
Top tip #2: You can always sprinkle these reviews around your website to help enforce that you have a great business and offer a top service.
The future
- Update your blog frequently (aim for at least one post a month).
- Take time to revisit old blog posts and update them.
- Share your blog posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc).
- Find places to share your posts that you feel would benefit from them, places such as restaurant or food forums.
Good luck with your blog posting! If you found this post useful then please feel free to share it.