Sometimes when it comes to promoting your business, you are going to struggle coming up with content for the blogs you write. If time is of the essence, and you need to come up with some ideas, I have compiled a list of possible blog ideas that can hopefully help you promote your business locally.
Whenever you make a blog, make sure to share it on Social Media and tag any businesses you reference. Never reference anyone negatively as it will not look good for your restaurant. We recommend having 750 words minimum in most of your blogs unless stated otherwise.
Specialty Dishes!
Every restaurant or takeaway has at least one one dish that is immensely popular, or chef specials that they personally believe in. These dishes are popular for a reason and you should tell the customers why they should try them! This could help promote sales of your specialty dishes as well as helping you get found when people are searching for specific dishes. I was even able to find Hariyali chicken tikka near my hometown of Wivenhoe despite few Indian restaurants actually making it thanks to a short blog! Sometimes all you need to appear is just to get that text out there!
10 Reasons To Try Our Delightful King Prawn Butterfly
5 Health Benefits of Scallops Supreme
What Makes Our Tandoori Chicken Tikka special!
The Secret to Smashing Mash Potato!
These are nice catchy examples of titles for social media, and people always like lists, reasons, health benefits and special things they cannot get anywhere else. They also love secrets as well! The word secrets has sold millions of marketing books worldwide!
In these posts, you give the audience what they want. The Prawn Butterfly is special for ten reasons that you will know, even if they are simply stating the obvious, ingredients and their health benefits, etc, Scallops can be healthy for a variety of reasons, as can any dish. In fact a lot of really unhealthy dishes have health benefits you wouldn’t believe! There are benefits to just about every dish that you can possibly make!
You can tell people how you make chicken tikka, and elaborate on technique because the chances of your audience having a tandoor oven are astronomically stacked against them having one. You can talk about the ovens too as part of the blog! Picking a plain subject like Mash is good because most people just mash the mash potatoes, especially here in south England or even use packet bought mash! (eww) You can do so much more! People reading your blogs can then apply your techniques and may share them with friends.
The thing about all the dishes you make is that they are special for a reason, and you can find some way to highlight absolutely every dish on your menu. We use Eaty McMeaty’s Butchers who supply our succulent lamb chops! Bam, local SEO from people looking up Eaty McMeaty’s! You can even tag Eaty’s Facebook page on Facebook for a possible share! More customers! More social visitors! The world is your oyster and I will tell you 5 reasons why you should blog about it’s health benefits for your business! (Eaty’s may even link you on their website if youhave a good reputation and are lucky, this will really help you as a backlink!)
5 Reasons!
1: Blogging about your restaurant or takeaway will start to increase your website traffic and if the content is good, your customers will increase in volume to boot!
2: Blogging about your restaurant regularly will give you content you can post to your social media. If your content is evergreen, you can always share old blogs a few months down the line if you have nothing to talk about. (You will always have something to talk about if you find yourself struggling for content in the future!)
3: Blogging about your restaurant or takeaway informs your customers and helps promote your business when they socially share information.
4: Blogging about your business regularly gives you an advantage over your competition who mostly are extremely lazy and non tech savvy.
5: Blogging about your business can increase your prestige and get you backlinks where people who appreciate you linking out to them will potentially link back.
There are many more reasons to blog and write about your business! But the main reasons are to get your website found and increase your customer base.
Special Events!
If you run special events or competitions with your restaurant, you will definitely want to blog about them. Talking about things you are doing, companies you integrate with at events, charity events you are supporting will all be incredibly useful.
Let’s say you run a restaurant and you host romantic evenings the second Tuesday of every month. This is something well worth blogging about. You can talk about special deals and menus for the evening and sell the scene for potential customers. You can integrate this into your Facebook strategy, sharing the blog when you run the event, so people get a taste of the experience!
If you run a takeaway and offer Two for Tuesday deals on special select pizzas, this can be a great thing to blog about too! You can go into detail, selling mouth watering mozzarella, beautiful crispy bacon, and a whole host of tremendous toppings to make your customers crave relentlessly for your amazing pizzas!
There are many other events you can run, evenings with certain bands and singers are good, business meals at lunchtime deals. This will all come in handy when people are looking up the bands, singers or where you can go for business dinners. When writing about these kinds of events and posting about them, you are going to increase your website traffic and potential customer reach. Always remember to put your restaurant name and business location information at the bottom of every blog! Keep it smart, keep it relevant and keep it local!
Drinks!
Sometimes it can pay to list and describe a list of your most popular drinks or cocktails. You can play with these in a variety of ways, recommending specific drinks with menu items. When sharing these kinds of blogs, you can also ask for customer responses, asking what drinks they would like to have. It’s a great way to pull in social interactions, and potentially bring in more popular drinks. Unpopular drinks should ideally be faded out of the menu in place of ones that are popular among your customers!
News Mentions!
Nothing beats getting mentioned in the news than inviting someone to come over and review your restaurant. Ask them to link their article to your website and give them a free meal, then when the article is up, you can then write about it and bam! You have a mutual backlink that will give you the edge on your competition as well as something to write about. You can talk about the meal they ordered and put thoughts and recommendations if customers would like to try it!
Sneaky SEO Blogs!
These are blogs that your competitors won’t necessarily think of and can give you an edge when competing locally. All local businesses you get supplies from which you reference in the blogs can be tagged and sometimes they will share your blog or link back to you. Everyone likes to be appreciated!
When it comes to blogging for restaurants, I am a particularly vicious marketer, and usually end up actively competing with restaurants by building bigger and better keyworded blogs. These slightly more unusual blogs have provided some of the most powerful benefits when it comes to raising local restaurant and takeaway visibility, so I definitely recommend giving them a shot. You should also consider making bigger and better versions of competing blogs as you battle for dominance with your rivals. Business is a war and you should aim to do everything better than your competition.
They will usually be low competition on these sneakier blogs, and they will gain you only a trickle of traffic, but they can still get you new customers and raise the game of the rest of your website when it comes to getting found. These kinds of blogs can turn around pages that are underperforming in searches and help your other articles climb up in the rankings!
Ingredients:
Ingredient blogs are weird and slightly unusual but a great place to show off the quality of your food. They are good because not many people will actively try to compete for them which will give you an advantage in local search results, you can also list a few of your favourite suppliers!
At Paulie’s Pizza Palace, we use black olives in our capricciosa pizzas. Black olives go well with a variety of different dishes including “insert dishes here”, and we absolutely love using them! We get our black olives from Olive’s Olive Garden on Pitt street (throw in a backlink for them!) The local information will help localise your website and people looking for their business, black olives locally etc will find your business. These blogs will get a small amount of traffic, and can help you with business networking as well as capturing a niche audience. They are fantastic for up and coming restaurants who are struggling to appear in search results.
Recipes!
Usually people are aghast when I mention putting recipes on their website, as they generally don’t want to share the secrets of making their amazing food. This can be easily fixed by providing recipes for dishes you don’t personally make. One of our Italian restaurant friends stopped making carbonara despite it being reasonably popular, so adding a recipe for carbonara would be an excellent idea for the. I’m these blogs, you can mention local suppliers and recommend them to localise the blog which will help boost your website’s local visitor numbers!
One of the beauties of sharing your secrets is that if you use high quality ingredients and recommend them, people will take more notice of the value of your food and this can be good for the prestige of your business.
Make sure to put the chef’s name, business name and location in the bottom of the blogs for the keywords.
Thank you blogs:
If you have run a competition recently, you’ve had a lot of people turning up or reviewing your business. Maybe you have had a local news group come over and give you some support by writing an article for you. You can easily thank them in a blog. Thank you blogs are great because they show that you value people and respect them!
A thank you blog usually runs best between 350 and 450 words, and should follow a basic pattern of mentioning the person or company you want to thank, linking to their website if they have one, and talking a little bit about how much they made your day. These blogs are best kept short and to the point so as not to seem like waffling and they will not be great for SEO. Always best to end with something like! Thank you from the team at restaurant name! Adding your name will help you in search results.
Finally…
You should always be looking to get as much exposure as possible. Offering free meals to local food reviewers and bloggers can be useful. Reference them in blogs and link to them as they link to you. It can grow your reputation as a business and help you on the path to running a successful restaurant or takeaway.
As your domain ages and expands and you add information, it will gain power. This is not an overnight thing, and it takes time and dedication. It is worth every second of writing blogs because they will continue to sell your business and services every day for the rest of your website’s life.
I hope this has been helpful to you. If you are looking for other ways to improve your restaurant or takeaway, check out my free guide for more information. It has helped a huge number of businesses turn their custom around and take things to the next level. It’s always being added to as well! Thank you for taking the time to read this!
