The Ocean Agency

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

At our Chicago SEO company, we content developers spend hours struggling over the perfect words for the homepage of websites we create. Organization and layout are crucial, and we consider every possible connotation of each selected word. To put an exclamation point or not can be a serious point (pun intended) of contention! And all this careful attention pays off– we nail down the message in just a few sentences right there on the first page that the average visitor sees.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

We obviously talk a lot about SEO content at The Ocean Agency – making sure we’ve got keyword-inclusive <h2> tags, bolding the right keywords, linking the right way. It’s all part of the effort to increase page rank and drive site traffic. Lately, I’ve seen a shift in SEO strategy from doing the right technical things to creating plain good content, and that’s really what it should be. Junta42 wrote a cool blog called 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010 with folks like Seth Godin and Jason Falls chiming in. The biggest takeaway that I saw: quality content trumps frequent crappy content. Enter editorial calendars.

SEO Editorial Calendars = Quality Content

Here in Chicago, everyone loves to eat. The restaurant and bar scene in Chicago is both vibrant and cutthroat. While there are plenty of diners and drinkers, there are also plenty of restaurants.

As a restaurant in a saturated market, how do you stand out?

Restaurant that needs some online marketing

Online marketing, especially a strong social media presence, can build a brand awareness for your restaurant and bring in waves of new customers with a small investment. Here are some tips on how local restaurants can leverage the power of social media and online marketing to shine in a cluttered market.

1) Use Twitter and Facebook:

While this seems obvious, there is more to these outlets than simply advertising your weekly specials. Facebook is ideal for creating a community around your restaurant or bar, with testimonials and pictures to prove that your place truly is the most fun. Moreover, a facebook fan page that is updated regularly implies that you both have outstanding customer service and a customer base that values your product. Facebook fan pages are a great way to sell an experience, to illustrate the ambiance and clientele of your bar or restaurant in a powerful way.

Twitter is a great way to advertise specials and hold interactive contests. For example, let’s say your trying to start up a happy hour business at your mostly nighttime bar.

What if you design a contest through twitter where anyone who includes a hashtag with your restaurant in it gets a free pitcher of beer from 3-6 PM? This a simple way to get your potential customers both curious and involved.

2) Food and Drink Bloggers are Powerful

Reaching out to food and drink bloggers (maybe even offering a free dinner in exchange for a review), is a great way to promote your restaurant online. Identify bloggers who have lots of online clout, meaning those who receive generous amounts of traffic, and those who are active across all social media platforms.

There is nothing better than having a potential new customer hear that your bar or restaurant is great from someone that they trust.

3) More People than ever are finding restaurants and bars online, As a restaurant or bar owner you need to manage your web presence.

As sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Metromix become more and more popular, as a restaurant or bar owner, you need to pay attention to what is being said about you.

While you cannot control what is being said on the hundreds of sites where customers can express their love or hatred of your establishment, you can interact with them, and respond to them in a manner that shows you care about your customers.

If there are customers that are especially angry, maybe you can offer them a free drink or appetizer next time they come in. Now instead of talking about a bad meal or terrible service, they’ll talk about your wonderful social media presence and generosity. Constant monitoring and interacting on social media channels is the only way to keep manage your bar or restaurants image online.

4) Search Engine Optimization is increasingly important.

Imagine this. After work a group of co-workers want to meet up at a bar. Because they live 20 minutes from where they work, they aren’t especially familiar with the bars or restaurants in the area. So, one of them types “Chicago Loop Happy Hour Bar” into google, then looks at the Googled sponsored results, looks at the Yelp, Citysearch, Metromix, and Chicago Tribune reviews, and then decides on a place based on a combination of user reviews, posted daily specials, and placement within the google search universe.

In that scenario, how would a customer find your bar or restaurant? Think about the previous scenario whenever you are managing your online presence. How are the title tags for your website? What about your html code, is it search engine friendly? Do you have a blog and strong backlinks?

While online marketing and social media expertise are important for all bars and restaurants, it is especially important for small and local restaurants, as they do not have the brand recognition that larger chain restaurants and bars do.

The good news is that small local restaurants can build effective brand recognition and find customers harnessing the power of online marketing. Build an interactive community around your restaurants, monitor your online presence, and make sure you rank well on major search engines. Then watch the customers stream into your doors.

After email, search is the most common online activity – 99.5% of users are searching for something on the web. Are they finding your business? And what keywords are they using to get to your website?  Our web design company understands that building a business online requires more than just a nice looking website – you need to drive traffic to that site as well.

Forbes magazine recently featured an article on the importance of building a web presence that is easy for your customers and prospective customers to find in the search engine results. According to a recent Nielsen report, 63% of consumers turn to the internet first when they are researching products or services, and 82% of them start with the search engines. However, only 44% of small businesses have websites, and less than half of them spend more than 10% of their marketing budget online.

Therefore, as a business owner, the number one way that your company can be discovered by potential customers is through the search engines, particularly the organic search results (which are the main listings on the left side of the results page, as opposed to the sponsored results which appear on the right – the majority of users recognize that these are advertisements so they avoid clicking on them).

Accordingly, optimizing your website for relevant keywords (that people actually use – avoid industry jargon or overly formal language) and developing an online marketing campaign that will position and maintain your listing on page #1 of the search results for these keywords is very possibly the most powerful way to connect with your target audience.