Restaurants Have the Best Stories and the Emptiest Blogs

You’re reading this in a restaurant that has finally emptied out, sitting down for the first time since four o’clock.

Someone is still scrubbing the flat top. Your feet ache, the till is short again, and the very last thing you want from a web designer tonight is a writing assignment.

So I won’t hand you one yet. I’d rather show you the bill first.

Who publishes more than you

Plumbers do. So do the electricians, the accountants, the lawyers, every trade I’ve spent years talking out of blogging on the grounds that they run out of material after six pages.

Nobody I audited publishes less than restaurants.

14.9% of the restaurant websites I audited publish a blog, against 37% across every industry in my data.

Forget the word blog for a moment, because it makes everyone picture a teenager’s diary. A blog post here is a page on your own website that answers one question a customer actually asks.

No diary required, and no clever headline either.

The five calls your staff take every week

Listen to what your own people get asked over the phone, night after night.

1. Where do we park on a game night, and is the lot behind you yours or the bank’s?

2. Are you open on the holiday Monday, and until what time?

3. Have you got a high chair, and will a stroller fit past the bar?

4. What’s on the tasting menu this month, and who grew half of it?

5. Is the patio heated in October, and can the dog sit under the table?

Your staff answer those out loud, one customer at a time, forever.

Every answer walks out the door with the person who asked. Then the next caller rings and one of your people says the identical words all over again, during service, while a table somewhere waits for water.

Write any one of them down and it works while the kitchen is closed.

A bistro I look after wrote the parking page on a Tuesday and stopped fielding that call almost entirely, because the people who used to ring and ask were reading the answer at eleven at night instead.

Two of them thanked the host for it on the way in, having booked without speaking to a human being at all, which the owner found faintly insulting until he counted the covers.

The customers who never called at all

Those are the cheap ones, though, because at least those people found your number.

A family driving in from three hours away isn’t typing your name into anything. They don’t know your name yet.

They’re describing their problem instead, on a phone, from the passenger seat of a car doing seventy on the interstate. Your trade fits that screen better than almost anybody, then keeps the poor woman waiting while the pictures arrive.

Somewhere with a heated patio in October. A place a stroller fits. Open late on a Sunday near the arena.

You know the answer to every one of those cold. You’ve delivered it across a counter a hundred times this year, to a stranger holding a menu.

You’ve simply never written it down anywhere a search engine could find it.

So the family eats at the place that did, and you never learn they existed. No missed call, no empty voicemail, no receipt for the loss.

Losses like that never show up in a bad week, which is the trouble with them. They show up as a Tuesday that felt a little quiet, and a Tuesday that feels a little quiet is the easiest thing in the world to blame on the weather.

Multiply that by every question your kitchen can answer better than anybody else on your street, then leave it running for a couple of years.

What your homepage says instead

Set those five answers beside whatever your homepage says today. Let me guess. Welcome, fresh local ingredients, a warm atmosphere for family and friends.

Every restaurant on the planet already owns that sentence, so it wins you nobody at all. The father hunting for a high chair reads it, learns nothing he hadn’t already assumed, and carries on down the list of results.

He can’t write to you about it either. Your whole trade gets talked about constantly and can hardly ever be sent a message.

How’s it working out for you?

The software isn’t the obstacle

WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and Framer all ship with a publishing tool built into the dashboard. If your site runs on one of those, nothing needs buying and nobody needs hiring, because the tool is already sitting in the menu on the left under a word you’ve scrolled past a hundred times.

If it runs on something else, ask whoever built it where a new page goes. The answer takes two minutes and usually amounts to a link and a password.

Knowing where a new page goes, and holding the password that puts it there, covers most of running the thing yourself.

Plenty of owners stall right there, at a login screen nobody ever walked them through, on a site another designer set up years ago. Restaurant sites are the ones I build, so I hand the login over with the walkthrough attached. A page you can’t publish is a page you won’t.

The obstacle is the hour, and I’d never pretend otherwise. An hour is a real cost in a kitchen, and anyone who tells you it isn’t has never worked one.

You aren’t lazy, and I can prove it

I’ve worked doubles in a kitchen, so I know exactly what the job takes out of a person.

The checks that take five minutes are done. Choose restaurants in the explorer on that report, leave the city menu on all cities, and 99.2% of you carry a title tag comes back beside the number of sites I checked it on, a shade above the 99.1% I get nationally.

A trade that skips the easy jobs doesn’t clear that one. You wrote it, or the person who built the site wrote it and you left it alone, and either way someone was paying attention.

Nothing in that says careless.

It says nobody has ever sat down and written the pages, because writing occupies an hour and you haven’t got an hour.

What one page is worth

Pick the question your staff answer most often. The parking, the high chair, the holiday hours, whichever one makes them sigh before they answer it.

Write the answer the way you’d deliver it to a customer standing in front of you. Three hundred words is plenty. Attach a photograph and publish it.

Then wait a month and notice who walked through your door because of it. Ask the next few tables how they found you, and write down whatever they say.

Your website may be counting them for you already, though someone in the building has to be able to open the account and look.

While you’re waiting, I keep a few restaurant sites that treat their words as carefully as their pictures. Read those ones. Don’t just look at them.

Then do the next question the month after, and the one after that when the season changes. Five pages a year is a slow pace for a writer and a blistering one for a restaurant.

If it were my restaurant, I’d write the parking page on a Sunday morning, before anyone else was awake, and I’d have it live before the first delivery arrived.