Chris C

Local SEO for Restaurant Websites

September 25, 2018 By Chris C Leave a Comment

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is one of the most popular digital marketing tactics among local businesses. This is because SEO is a cost-effective tactic that can help businesses bring in customers over a long period of time. This is unlike short-term marketing tactics such as online advertising as you stop getting leads the moment you stop paying for ads. Some SEO agencies in Singapore claim that SEO provides a much greater ROI than social media as well.

However, search engine optimisation is not an easy topic to understand. Not only is it very complex, but it constantly changes over time, making it that much harder to understand. For example, Google has stated on the record that it constantly tweaks its algorithms. The same can be said for the other major search engines such as Yahoo or Bing.

In this article, we will explore SEO and how it can be relevant for local businesses such as your restaurant or bar.

Social Media Tips for Restaurants

September 15, 2018 By Chris C Leave a Comment

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade, you would know that social media is one of the most important innovations to reach our shores. Almost everyone participates in it these days. It’s almost impossible for you to find someone who doesn’t have either a Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn account.

We also know that social media is not only a channel for entertainment. It is also an important place of business, and many fortunes have been won and lost because of social media marketing. Almost every kind of business has a social media presence these days – from small mom-and-pops to large multinational companies.

Social media is especially important for restaurants, bars and clubs. By their very nature, these types of businesses are social and expand very well across these channels.

We have prepared a quick social media guide to how you can use it to help you get more people into your restaurant.

Ensure Your Social Media Profile is Complete

This may sound very obvious to you, but you would be surprised at how many companies do not complete their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or Snapcat profile properly. Ensure that you upload all the necessary images and logos, and that key information such as your opening hours is clearly reflected.

Beautiful Photos

Most social media networks such as Facebook or Instagram are visual in nature. Beautiful photos are an important part of social media marketing. Even more importantly, beautiful photos help you sell stuff.

Ensure that the photos that you upload of your restaurant and its food are of the highest quality. Your fans should become hungry the moment they visit your fan page because of how good the photography looks.

Social Media Monitoring & Listening

What are your customers saying about you? Not everyone leaves a review or will be kind enough to leave you constructive feedback. Sometimes, they just leave a complaint on their blog or their Newsfeed and leave it at that. You won’t notice it, and in the meantime your reputation is left in tatters. By using a reliable social media monitoring tool, you would be able to get these results as soon as they occur.

Run Social Media Contests

If your fan page is new, then you will need to incentivise your fans to engage with you. One of the best ways to do this is to run a social media contest on your timeline. It can be a simple timeline contest that helps improve engagement. If this is the first few contests that you are running, do not run those that require a lot of effort on the part of the contestants. This includes photo contests. You may not get good results at the start.

Run Facebook Ads

Facebook is now pay-to-play. Many brands have stated that they have been losing organic traffic over the last few years. This is because Facebook is now prioritising content from friends and family instead. You need to run Facebook ads so that your content can be seen by a wider audience.

Timeless SEO Tactics That Still Work

September 1, 2018 By Chris C Leave a Comment

If you have ever done SEO or worked with an SEO agency, you would know that SEO tactics change with the wind. What may work today may cause your site to become penalised the next day. Google has hundreds or even thousands of changes to its famous search algorithms. That keeps a lot of SEO specialists on their toes.

For example, take the case of guest posting. It used to be the go-to tactic for white hat marketers but since then, Google has been warning SEO experts that they may get penalised for overusing it.

However, despite the ephemeral nature of SEO, there are some SEO tactics that are timeless. Changing or tweaking these factors will only make your website run better.

Timeless SEO Tactics

Here are some of the more interesting and timeless SEO tactic that you may decide to use to help improve the organic search rankings of your website.

Clear Site Navigation

A clear site navigation is the best starting point for any search engine optimisation campaign. Not only will this help your visitors better navigate around your site, it will help you move the link juice around more effectively. Google can easily crawl and understand your website before indexing it into their database.

Title Tag

The title tag is one of your page’s meta tags. This means that your human website visitors will not usually be able to see its content, but it is very important to search engine spiders. You need to optimise your title tags by placing your target keywords there. You only have 60 characters to play with and do not stuff your keywords.

Meta Description Tag

Your meta description tag shows up under the title tag in the search engine results page. Goole has gone on the record and said that the content here is not a ranking factor. However, the meta description is clearly seen in the SERPs and is a huge factor in whether a visitor will click on your website or not.

Headings Tags

Your heading tags are an important and often overlooked component in SEO. From a usability standpoint, it helps to break up the text on the page and make it more ‘skimmable’. From a SEO standpoint, Google gives more weight to the words that are written within the heading tags. However, don’t stuff your heading tags with your keywords as that particular old school strategy no longer works.

Anchor Text

Your link anchor text will help Google better understand what the linked page is about. Google has mentioned several times that this is a key factor and you need to be able to incorporate the correct anchor text to every link you build. However, be careful about the over-optimisation penalty. If your anchor text is deemed over-optimised, then you may get hit by a Penguin link penalty.

Page Speed

Improving your website page speed should always be a major priority for webmasters. Not only is this great from a SEO standpoint, but users have now expected a speedy website experience from everyone. Google has also confirmed that page load speed is a ranking factor that you need to worry about.

How to hire a web designer for your bar in Singapore

August 21, 2018 By Chris C Leave a Comment

Are you in the middle of searching for a web designer for your restaurant or bar in Singapore? If you are, we are sure that you are starting to realise that that is not such an easy task after all. We would all love if we could get the best web designer in Singapore to work on our accounts, but that is not an easy task. Firstly, what is good web design is highly subjective. Secondly, prices vary and you need to ensure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck.

We’re here to help you simplify the process of choosing a web designer for your restaurant or bar in Singapore so here are some of our tips:

Expertise in restaurant & bar web design

You want to find web designers who have domain expertise. In this case, you’re looking for web design companies who understand the food and beverage industry well. You need your web designers to be able to bring their knowledge from developing hundreds of websites for other bars and restaurants to yours. That experience and know-how are invaluable to you.

The last thing you want is a generic web design company that does not understand the restaurant and bar business and just wants to pawn off a templated corporate website off to you.

At the very list, ask them for a list of their completed projects. Also, you may also want to ask them for some references. Some may not be able to give you any as this information is quite sensitive.

Good communication skills

You want to work with a web design agency that has a great rapport with your team. Their communications and project management skills are very important, and there needs to be a good cultural fit between your two teams.

Pricing

Web design pricing is and will always be an important consideration when choosing a web development company to work with. However, don’t let it be your main consideration. There are many other factors that should trump how much it costs. Of course, for a simple restaurant website, you won’t be paying six figures.

SEO Expertise

Search engine optimisation is the process of improving your organic traffic coming from the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Most people refer to this process as simply SEO. SEO expertise is a very important consideration for restaurant websites as this will help you get more traffic.

There is no point in building a beautiful website and have no visitors. Other digital marketing tactics such as Google AdWords or social media may be too expensive over time for most restaurant owners. This makes SEO a great marketing tactic.

Most web design agencies claim to be good at SEO, but they really only know the basics. Ask to see some of their SEO work and gauge for yourself, They should have some clients who are already ranking in the search engine rankings page that they can show you.

Choosing a web design company for your restaurant

We hope that the tips we outlined above will make it easier for you to choose a web design company that will make your restaurant website a huge success!

3 Web Design Trends to Watch for in 2019

August 14, 2018 By Chris C Leave a Comment

Every year, thousands of websites are developed in Singapore. We’re approaching 2019 soon and this year, we examine what were the biggest web design trends in 2018 and from that try to predict what will be huge web design trends in 2019 as well. We also examined the Internet to find out what the leading web designers and developers think will be popular in 2019.

While we don’t always advocate that you should be following web design trends each year, it’s a good idea to know what they are so you can determine how useful these trends are to you and your business. Furthermore, what constitutes an attractive web design in Europe may not be such a great web design in Singapore. Restaurant websites should be even more careful and not forget that your primary objective is to get people into seats, not to win web design awards.

Here are some of our favourite upcoming web design trends in 2019:

1) Bold & Vibrant Colours

James Bearne, the creative director of Kagool, mentioned that they have been seeing an increase in the number of bold colours being used across all digital platforms. It seems that some brands are becoming braver and bolder and want to include more vibrant colours in their brand assets.

As both designers and consumers become more accustomed to consuming content online, we are seeing many web design companies departing from web safe colours and experimenting with those that have a bit more ‘pop’. The technological advances in monitors and screens and their reducing costs mean that more people have access to high-quality screens that can reproduce vibrant colours.

If you’re a new brand that needs to grab attention, or an established brand that is trying to set itself apart from the traditional and safe, consider using bolder and more vibrant colours in your next website redesign.

2) Flat Website Design (Sort Of)

Flat design was all the rage a few years ago. We’re still seeing it hanging on in 2018. It seems to be evolving somewhat and we expect a new version of it, Flat 2.0, to become popular in 2019. This new type of flat design – or maybe we would be better off calling it semi-flat design – will keep most of the principles of its predecessor but will add nuance and depth to more important elements in the design. It’s still a far cry from the skeuomorphism and hyperreality of the noughts, but it seems like we’re trying to find a moderate middle.

Gradients became synonymous with boring corporate powerpoints through overuse in the last decade. However, they seem to be having a resurgence among the design crowd. This time though, gradients are coming back with bolder colours and more subtle transitions to make it more palable outside of the corporate offices.

Major brands such as Dropbox and Mastercard have been rocking these trends in their latest redesigns.

Shadows are also coming back in fashion, mostly due to improved web browser functionality.

What are Your Favourite Web Design Trends

We believe that you will find more bold colours and less flat design in 2019. What do you think are going to be huge web design trends in 2019? Share with us in the comments below and let’s see if you are right!