Google’s Free Services For Your Restaurant
How to easily leverage free Google tools to grow your restaurant business: Google Trends and Google Alerts
Besides Google Analytics and Google Adwords, the search engine giant offers extremely useful tools — all for free.
Let’s have a look how a smart restauranteur can get a competitive edge over the competition by making data-driven decisions based on Google Alert and Google Trends.
All Set? — Google Alert
Ever wanted to know when someone writes about your restaurant on their blog or website? If yes, the free web service Google Alert might be a helpful tool to get notified automatically in an easy-to-read mail format.
Notification Setup
After log-in with your Google account you can set up new keywords and phrases that shall be monitored. The alerts can be sent to your registered Gmail address as-it-happens (i.e. immediately), summarized in an daily update or weekly round-up. As a default the relevant sources are selected as automatic, but you can further detail your content source by setting a preference like news, blog, web and videos etc.
With the language (content text language) and region (geographic location of source url) settings one can filter specifically e.g. for English content regarding Ramen shops in Japan. It is possible to show all results that are coming up on Google’s monitoring algorithm, but for general keywords this ends in too many results which are non consumable in the end. Therefore, it might be better to keep the how many settings on default as “only the best results”.
When you hit “Create Alert” the newly added alert is shown in your My Alert list, where you can delete and edit it again.
The digested notifications should look something like this. Here you can see the matched keywords highlighted in bold and also see the source of the pick-up article (here: The Japan Times). Google is clever and will connect the dots for you: Sushi is associated with Japanese cuisine for example.
Best Practices
- Create a daily habit: you can switch on the digest mode, which allows you to receive all notifications in one email and set the delivery time on a suitable time to generate a habit. For example in my case, I have set the delivery time to 7 am in the morning to have time during breakfast to flick through the articles and stay informed.
- Catch all news: if you search for too complex search terms, it is very unlikely that Google will have something for you everyday. If you just go with a single keyword, the search might get too broad and you will be floated in notifications. For myself a combination of two (at most three) keywords gives the best results, e.g. ramen shop or Tokyo restaurant.
Insights
Combined with listening to certain hashtags on Twitter or Instagram, Google Alerts can help you to never miss out on your own web media presence, watch your competition or just follow the latest industry trends. Here eavesdropping on both social media and websites (i.e. Google) is important.
- As a restaurant owner: register your brand/shop name and listen to the world wide web. There might be publications about you without you knowing. If applicable, pick up those publications and repost them on your socials or webpage. Look out for feedback points and try to improve your business upon those.
- As a restaurant manager: follow your direct competition on Google Alerts to keep track of their latest moves. Differentiate against your competition and play-out your strengths vs. their weaknesses.
- As a restauranteur: look out for the latest industry trends in the food & beverage space. You might get a new concept or menu item idea to help grow your business.
Be Trendy! — Google Trends
Google Trends is one of Google’s free web services that analyzes the popularity of search requests in Google Search across various languages and geographical regions. The search volume of different search queries over time is displayed in comparable graph formats.
Trend Setup
For example, have you ever asked yourself whether more people are interested and ultimately want to consume Japanese sake as compared to Japanese whiskey? This assumes that the search volume is correlated to the interest in the search term and lastly is an indicator of what consumers are currently looking for. Going back as far as 2004 Google Trends also give insights of raising or falling popularity.
Let’s look at the Japanese whiskey vs. sake example. We can see from the graph below that the level of interest for Japanese sake is nearly constant over the 2004–2020 timeframe, whereas Japanese whiskey shows a rapid growth of interest from 2014 onwards. In summer 2015 Japanese whiskey even capsized sake in popularity indicating a boom of Japan-originated whiskey in recent years. When just focusing on the whiskey curve one can discover that in the colder months the search volumes are higher than in the spring or summer hinting at seasonality.
Drilling even further into the data that is provided by Google we can see from the breakdown by subregion (in this example by states) that the popularity of sake in comparison to whiskey from Japan is relatively higher in the Eastern states. The proportion of interest in Japanese sake is greater along the West coast.
Another useful tool is the related queries section. The most relevant search queries associated with the search term are listed up on a relative popularity scale. This information can support you to identify further specific preferences within this topic. Also, the related search queries can possibly help you to gain keywords ideas utilized in search engine optimization.
Insights
Just from the graphs above what could your take-aways be?
- As a restaurant owner: considering the purchase of Hibiki whiskey and making it part of your drink menu.
- As an alcohol wholesaler: take the seasonal interested of Japanese whiskey into consideration by reinforcing marketing activities during the fall and winter months.
- As an alcohol importer: prioritizing the states where you want to get the alcohol license in and focus your sales activities on.
Another Google service is Google MyBusiness. As an integral part of every marketing strategy of restaurant businesses, it allows the management of a shop on Google Search and Map services. Putting your shop out there for the customer to find it on Google Maps is very important to get traffic. More on that in another episode.
