Revamp Your Restaurant Website: Speak with Our Chef

Having a web presence for your restaurant is step one for serving an online community. To foster and grow your online following you’ll need to make sure not to let your content get outdated. This task can seem daunting at first, and that’s why we brought in our content chef to share some tips and tricks on how you can keep your website fresh. 

Running a business is already a lot of work, and remembering to manage multiple online profiles or webpages can often get pushed to the backburner. You might make changes to one online profile and forget to update the rest, causing confusion for your customers and a headache for yourself. Here at Fisherman, we aim to fix that. ‍

Consistency is Key

The first piece of feedback from our chef is to be consistent across all online platforms. This not only helps with search engine optimization (SEO), but it also limits customer confusion. To stay on top of these updates you should keep a checklist of all of the places where you need to update your content. Your checklist may include:

• In-store displays
• Website
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google My Business
• GrubHub, DoorDash, and other online ordering platforms 

Having a checklist and marking them off when you are done is an easy visual that will help you stay on track. If your schedule doesn’t allow time to do this yourself you can work with a service that keeps your menu updated across your online platforms. 

The Fisherman team is also here to help you with menu and content updates. You can simply send us a text or email requesting changes to be made. You can even send us a picture of the menu and we’ll digitize it for your website. Fisherman also provideA a simple to use Menu Editor within our Dashboard where you can edit a menu in minutes. 

Formatting to be found

Keeping your website content and menu updated may be the meat and potatoes, but making sure it's formatted to be web-friendly is your seasoning. As a busy restaurant owner, you may be tempted to use images or PDFs to quickly update your menus or content. While it provides a quick fix in the short term, it can actually hurt your long-term efforts to reach a broader audience. 

The advice from our chef here at Fisherman is to avoid using images and PDFs if possible. They are much harder for users to read, especially on mobile devices, and you are losing out on valuable content that boosts your website's search engine optimization. Not only is actual text more valuable, but it’s important to have your text in HTML format. 

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the standard for content and documents on the web. An HTML file consists of the text that you want to appear and a set of embedded instructions called HTML tags. These tags give the browser instructions that include formatting, display of images, and hyperlinks. So why is this important? Glad you asked. 

HTML is important because it tells browsers how your website should appear and how it should look on different size screens. This is especially important for mobile visitors which often make up two-thirds of overall website traffic. 

The benefits of digitizing your menu into a text format on your website are that Google and other search engines can crawl the content on the website so that when consumers are searching for certain menu items near them, your restaurant will appear. 

Fresh is Best

Now that we know how to build and maintain healthy web content, it’s important that you do this often to keep things fresh. You want to engage your website visitors to boost your brand.

Periodically updated content also helps increase your website’s SEO value by giving search engines like Google more content they can crawl and present to people searching for food or services that you offer. Keeping your website content fresh can be done in many ways: 

• Having a space on your homepage that features weekly specials 
• A mission or about page highlighting what your restaurant specializes in 
• A services pages if you offer catering or event space rentals 
• Menu updates as often as you change your menu 
• A blog showcasing your food creations or current events 

Updating content can be a shared task across employee roles. If you have a host or reservations manager have them work through a checklist during downtime. It can also be empowering to owners to tell their story and see the community respond to what they have to offer. 

Creating a content checklist, being consistent across platforms, and providing fresh content is meant to boost your revenue, not drain your energy. It can be stressful at first, but once you get into the rhythm of the task and see the results it becomes an easy way to impact your bottom line. 

We of course are always looking to make it even easier. Fisherman can take care of all these restaurant menu and web content services, allowing you to take a well-deserved break. Interested in learning more? Get in touch with us today to get started! 

Get in Touch

‍