Pizza Today - March 2021 - 41

them to your pizzeria over competitors. All photos should be optimized
so both desktop and mobile website
opens quickly for online customers.
A slow opening website will turn
away customers in a hurry. "
Avoid using stock photography.
People want to see your food and
what your dining experience is like.
Quick tip: a table near your front
window may produce perfect light
for food photography that can even
be taken with your smartphone.
Just as your dining experience
solidifies your brand, the same is
true of a website's visitor experience.
If those do not match, you may be
falling short of your brand online.
There are three areas that you'll
want to familiarize yourself with
and be able to ask the right questions of your website manager. We'll
introduce them here:
* SEO. Search Engine Optimization, you've probably heard this
term and know and hope that your
web developer is on it. Did you
work with your developer to create
a keyword roadmap and/or revisit
your keywords lately? Only you and
your team know your business so
you should be part of the keyword
strategies.
Rudolph Musngi, head of marketing at
Orders2me, says a key to increasing web
traffic is with local SEO. " Ranking high
on search results for 'pizza near me' or
similar keywords will give you high-quality and FREE traffic, " he says. " SEO is a
bit more complicated, but in a nutshell,
it's about performing several optimizations on your website and your business
listings to increase user experience, quality of traffic and content so that search
engines like Google will reward you with
appearing first on search results. "
It's not enough to merely identify keywords that you think people will use, you
also want to research to see what search
terms people are actually using. Think in
terms of overall restaurant terms, niche
keywords that your restaurant falls into
and your restaurant's branding keywords.
* Responsive. Your website MUST
be easy to view, navigate and interact with
on a mobile phone. " A good tip would

build relationships with your audience and understand where they are
landing on your website. Are they
coming from Facebook or Google
Search? How many of them land on
your blog posts? Or your product
pages? These things matter because
you begin to understand where your
customers are coming from and how
to convince them to order online. "
Ask your website pro to go over
the analytics, not just totals. Get
to the meat of the analytics to see
who's visiting the site, when are they
ordering on the site, where they are
going on the site and how long they
are spending. You may even want
access to the analytics yourself to
browse all the areas you can learn
about your website's traffic.
Driving more traffic to your
website and online ordering requires
your time, attention and planning. ■
DENISE GREER is the Executive
Editor of Pizza Today.

A QUICK WEBSITE
BASICS CHECKLIST
be to visit your own pizzeria's website on
your phone (if you have a spare old and
really slow phone then test it there too), "
Musngi says. " If you find it confusing,
or slow, or just plain excruciating to go
through the process of ordering on your
own website, then your customer might
have a 10x worse experience. "
People are making dining decisions on
their smartphones while they are running
errands, leaving appointments or on their
couch. Your website should meet their
mobile experience expectations.
* External drivers. Marzo and
Musngi point to good strategies to help
drive traffic to your website. Your website
should be submitted and verified by
Google. Use social to drive traffic. Get
reviews and maintain all of your review
site accounts.

You can dive as deep as you
want to understand your website's
performance. Musngi says, " Try to

* Website is mobile responsive. Users
should not have to zoom in or
scroll across to see menus and
images on a smartphone.
* Contact info, menu and ordering is
easy to find on homepage.
* Phone numbers are active and
clickable to call.
* Location has clickable directions.
* Menu is easy to read in body text
format. It's good for search and
visibility. Menus shouldn't be hidden behind PDF links or in images.
* High-quality photos of your food
are present, and they have meta
descriptions - a must for SEO
and ADA compliancy. And, please
no more stock photos. Your smartphone is a high-resolution camera!
* Online ordering is easy to access
and use.

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Pizza Today - March 2021

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