Here are a few thoughts from an internet marketing background:
For SEO, you really just have to make sure that your website metadata (your web developer would know where this is) is set so that your pizzeria shows up relatively high when someone searches Google for “Pizza MY TOWN” (insert your town name). But Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other sites like this will most likely show up above your site because they have a lot of authority and history. There’s not much you can do about that. Most likely, no matter what you do, when someone Google’s “pizza MY TOWN”, Google will top the list with paid ads, then comes Yelp and TripAdvisor, then will come your website. Making sure your website metadata is correct should keep you in the middle of page 1, which is good. But paying someone a monthly fee for SEO is a complete waste of money (yet a lot of people are paying for it).
If you have a Wordpress website and are using the Yoast SEO plugin, you would change the settings “Meta Title” to “Jimmy’s Pizza – Best Pizza in Albany NY”, and the setting “Meta Description” to something like “made from scratch pizza with nothing but the freshest ingredients.” That way all that text is displayed in your Google listing. That’s really all you should focus on from an SEO standpoint.
The key to growing a business will always be getting paid advertising to work profitably. So that means magazine, Google ads, Facebook ads, Yelp ads (DON’T USE), any type of paid ads, you need to answer one question: If I spend $1 on this ad platform, do I make more than $1 back in a reasonable amount of time. If the answer is yes, then you spend more money on that platform. If the answer is no, then you need to spend your money elsewhere where it will be profitable. If the answer is “I think so, probably”, then you are on dangerous ground. You could be spending money where it doesn’t come back to you. So you’d be better off not advertising at all.
Facebook and Google are some of the best places to advertise right now, mostly because they are trackable, and you can automate your advertising system. You can test different ads very cheaply ($20 and you know if this ad is good instead of guessing with magazine ads), and you can very clearly see the winner and then scale that one ad up. There are differences between advertising on Google and Facebook though, and those differences should guide your stratgey. On Google, people are in “Buy Mode”, which means they are searching for an answer to the question “What am I going to eat tonight”. The cost per click on Google may be higher than on Facebook, but since they are in Buy Mode, your conversions (# of clicks that become restaurant visitors) will be higher, more quickly. On Facebook, you target “people who are probably interested in your product” based on things they post and like on Facebook. That means that they may not be looking for pizza right now, but they probably will be soon, so let’s get their email address so I can email you when you’re ready for pizza. Because people are not in Buy Mode, they may not come in as quickly as Google ads, but the cost per click is much less. Pair that with a solid automated email system, and you have yourself the best solution. You send out ads, ask them to sign up, and then you email them weekly so that when they do think of pizza, you are in the front of their mind.
The reason email marketing is critical is because it’s “free advertising”. When you put out an ad, no matter which platform you use, you are paying for “impressions”. You are paying ad platforms to put your business in front of potential customer’s faces. Sometimes someone will remember you from the ad and come visit, and sometimes they won’t remember you from the ad. The traditional strategy is “get in front of their face enough times, and they will remember you”. The problem with this strategy is that every time you “get in front of that person”, you are paying for more ads. You are paying multiple times to reach the same potential customer.
Here’s where email marketing is much better. The new strategy that works very well is this: put out an ad that gets potential customers to give you their email address. This buys you the ability to advertise to them whenever you want via email, FOR FREE, forever (or until they unsubscribe). Once you capture a new lead’s email address, you can stop paying for ads to reach that person, and simply communicate with that person via email, which is VERY cheap ($25/mo for a good system). So if you get 3,000 emails in your database, the cost per email is essentially pennies. Much less than reaching that person via more ads.
Then, from an ad standpoint, you tell Facebook and Google to stop sending ads to people who already gave you their email. That way you don’t spend any more money on ads to that person, and shift that money to acquire new potential customers’ email addresses. You can do this very easily in Facebook.
The strategy is: only pay to reach the same customer ONCE via ads, get their email address, then advertise to them via email for free for as long as you want.
Another huge benefit of collecting email addresses is that you can send an email and immediately bring in revenue. If you have a database of 3,000 email addresses and you send out a special that is only good for Mon-Thurs, you will typically get a 2%-4% redemption rate based on my experience (depending on how engaged your customers are with you). So if you have an average check value of $25 and you have a profit margin of 60% (on new traffic. Existing customers pay your bills and may get you 10% margin, but if we double your traffic, your rent, insurance, and most labor don’t increase. You just have to cover food costs on that increase in business), that equals $15 profit per ticket. If 4% of your 3,000 person list redeems a coupon ($5 off $30 say), then that’s 120 people, with $13 profit per check, which is an extra $1,560 profit from sending one email, and that’s during Mon-Thurs (the hardest days to fill). Do that 4 times a month and that is an extra $75K a year. Big time dollars.
The smart way of doing this is by automating everything. You automate your Facebook ad system and you automate your emails. That way you aren’t writing and sending emails all the time. You write a bunch of emails that an email program sends out on a set schedule after they sign up. This runs in the background so you don’t have to touch a thing. The emails are going out while you run your restaurant. This also allows you to learn about your customers. You learn what specials make people open an email and click on a coupon and come to the restaurant. You test different specials to see which ones get the best response. The email system allows you to track email opens and clicks, and that tells you what specials are most attractive to your customers. You can also survey your customers directly and ask them what they want. Much better that trying to guess what they want.
This is what I do for my clients. If you want to get into more details, send me a message. I hope this message was helpful! Online advertising is incredibly powerful if you do it right!