If you are a busy restauranteur or chef/owner, the absolute last thing you even want to think about spending your time on is writing a blog that you assume no one is going to read. What you might not realize is, blogs are a great way to help drive potential customers to your website, even if no one reads it. Before we go any further, you can always hire me to write them for you! Just reach out!
Imagine you are a traveler in Boston who really wants a nice warm bowl of authentic New England Clam Chowder but you aren't sure who serves it. What's your next step? To the internet! Your search sends you a whole list of restaurants in your area that serve chowder and off you go.
Now let's say you are the chef/owner of a cute little chowder house in the Seaport District of Boston that is just starting out. In order to put yourself on the map alongside the big guns like Legal Seafood and Neptune Oyster House, you'll have to work on your site's search engine optimization (SEO). This is a very official sounding term that basically means you've optimized your chances of showing up on one of those searches. There are a few ways of doing this and some of them cost big bucks, but a few of them are simple & free. Blog writing is one of the later, if you can find the time/energy to do it.
The first thing you need to do is fill your blog with keywords. Keywords are simple and searchable words that end up in people's searches. In the case of our chowder house here, including keywords like "clam chowder in Boston" or "best New England clam chowder" into your blog's content, subtitle and title is one of the best free ways of optimizing your chances of being included in searches. Using appetizing photos of your dishes with alternative text descriptions including your keywords is another great way of drawing attention to your offerings. I know it sounds kinda silly to write a whole blog post about chowder, but you would be surprised at how much a simple thing like this can do to help grow your customer base.
You can also use your blog as a landing page for special events and menus. A blog I wrote recently got over 1,800 views because I used it as the landing page for a restaurant's Thanksgiving to-go ordering information. Since that blog is evergreen, next year, when people search for Thanksgiving to-go in Cambridge, that restaurant's website will very likely show up on their search results.
I offer blog content generation as one of my many services. Reach out if you want help!