Restaurant web traffic up 13%, with 27% more bookings
Website traffic growth and leads are essential for any business to succeed and grow. Understanding the digital channels that will deliver these is thus paramount to creating a digital strategy for market growth. In this quick post, we identify how digital marketing impacts restaurants, and show how Bring Performance helped a restaurant reach its goal of increasing bookings.
Australian restaurant and delivery market in 2022
The online restaurant and delivery market is one that has grown in the past 12 months. Year-on-year, global traffic has increased by 15.11%. Australia has seen similar YoY growth, up 13.38%.
Menulog, Uber Eats and Dominos are all experiencing positive trends. New and emerging websites like krispykreme.com.au and inline.app (a restaurant booking platform) have also experienced substantial traffic increases in the past months, growing by an average of 75%, month-on-month.
What drives industry growth?
To better understand market growth and how digital marketing will impact your restaurant, we look at which digital marketing channels are best for acquiring customers.
Aside from direct traffic, where customers type in the web address themselves or use bookmarks, organic search drives 37.29% of traffic to these restaurant or delivery websites. This includes Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and others.
Various search trends are emerging across the market. A common pattern is the “near me” search. Searches for “food near me” have increased by 31%, and those for “restaurants near me” are up a whopping 140%.
We can take this as a clear indicator that people want to dine out. They want to experience the food in the actual venue’s ambience, and make the most of eating out in warm weather. This indicates that the restaurant industry is alive and well, post-COVID. It’s time to invest in your digital marketing plan and “bring” customers to your website to book tables.
Showing the value of search in the restaurant industry
Location-based search is a massive driver of website traffic and customer engagement. By combining it with the value of other optimisation best practices, the SEO team at Bring created a campaign to help an Italian restaurant reach one of its marketing goals – increasing its profile for dinner bookings.
Achieving this and creating a sustainable ongoing strategy is relatively simple:
- Tidy up local business citations, Google My Business, and all other online business listings.
- Optimise current website content, page titles and metadata to support the latest search behaviours.
- Leverage and grow review profiles, including terms related to the services offered.
A couple of weeks in, the restaurant has increased dinner conversions by 27% and this is growing weekly.
Aggregator websites should also be leveraged. The data suggests that large numbers of searchers looking for “Italian restaurant” are clicking through to sites like TripAdvisor and BroadSheet. We highly recommend exploring and building partnerships with BroadSheet and focusing efforts on a well-maintained TripAdvisor profile in addition to your own website.
