Building a Restaurant as an Analogy for Constructing a Search-Engine-Friendly Web Site

The topic of how to plan for search engine optimization (SEO) often comes up when I am talking to small businesses and has been the topic of several discussions in just this last week. SEO is a very complex subject, but I like to frame the conversation with a high-level paradigm for how to think about and plan for ongoing success. With that in mind, here is an analogy:

Imagine you are opening a restaurant in an ordinary town on an ordinary budget, but you want your business to be an extraordinary success. Let’s look at three steps to achieving that success:

• Building the Restaurant
• Creating the Ambiance and the Menu
• Promoting the Restaurant

Building the Restaurant

Since we are making the analogy to building a web site, we will assume that you are building your restaurant from scratch. Will you hire an avant-garde architect who specializes in hay-bale construction, or stick with standard building materials and a straightforward design? Unless you are not concerned about budget, you will probably choose the latter. Building a web site is similar. At this point, there are a number of established content management systems (CMS’s) that provide all of the tools necessary to build a solid, feature-rich and search-engine-friendly site. I have been involved in web site projects recently that built upon WordPress, Joomla and Magento – all well-documented platforms with templates readily available that get the search engine basics right. Be very wary of a web developer who wants to build a site without leveraging one of these or a similar standardized tool set. In my experience, a web developer with self-described expertise in SEO will almost always do a worse job than what you would get with an unmodified WordPress template-based site. That is not to say that you can’t do well with a custom-designed site, but this advice is written for someone starting out and on a budget.

And as with the restaurant, getting the construction right will have little to do with your ultimate success. If you don’t follow standard design practices, or even worse if you don’t follow building codes, you are starting off on the wrong foot. But getting those things right just puts you on level ground with most of the other businesses in town. Using a platform or technology that follows search engine best practices will position you for success, but the content you create is what is going to attract visitors.

Creating the Ambiance and the Menu

How your restaurant is laid out and decorated will start to differentiate you from the competition. And even more important is what’s on the menu. Creating an ambiance that is pleasant and inviting will make visitors feel comfortable and encourage them to come back. And an interesting, original and well-executed menu is above all else what gets people interested in the first place, and it is what is going to get word of your restaurant to spread. The analogy here is to user experience and content.

Using one of the standard platforms I described above is the first step towards providing good user experience, but choosing where content will go and how users will navigate your content is a critical part of your success. When laying out your site, think about how people search for and find what they are looking for. For example, labeling a section “grub” rather than “menu” may sound cool, but by doing so you are asking people to think. People don’t want to think when they navigate, so make things as simple and obvious as you can. This reflects how search engines will evaluate the site as well, since few people search for “grub”, but many search for “menu”. Words on your web site are like ingredients to a restaurant. Get too weird and you will have a very small audience.

Your content is like what comes out of the kitchen. Make it interesting. Make it original. Make it so that visitors will want to tell their friends about it. Most importantly, don’t rely on an SEO consultant to develop your content for you. You know your business and you are passionate about what you do. It’s good to get the advice of someone who understands how search engines work, but get in the habit of creating and updating your own content. That isn’t to say you can’t hire a chef – but that person should be part of your business and share in your vision.

Promoting the Restaurant

Last but not least is getting out there and making sure that people know you exist. How many restaurants with great food have failed because people didn’t know to try them out? SEO is very much the same way. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR in search engine ranking is the number of quality links you have pointing to your site. And keep in mind that the context and authority of the source of the link matter a great deal. Just as a restaurant review written by a random blogger matters less than one written by the local paper, you want to get links from authoritative sites in your subject matter domain or geographic area. If you sell running shoes, get out there on the top running-focused sites. If you sell accounting services, make sure the most popular local business-resource sites link to you.  Good content is key to this process. If you have interesting, original content, people will want to link to it. If you have thin or boilerplate content, you are going to struggle to get every link.

I have simplified things quite a bit, but I believe that small business SEO is not all that complex. Some people like to make it complicated because it serves their personal interests. Search engines put a colossal amount of effort into determining who genuinely has the best content to match a user’s query, and for the most part do their job well. But I won’t deny that there is benefit to understanding the minutiae. There are a number of great sites dedicated to the details and latest developments in search engine optimization, including several of those highlighted in my blog roll to the right. I recommend that you check those out if that’s where your interest lies.

To recap, here is how you can position yourself for ongoing success:

• Start with a standardized, well documented platform (Building the Restaurant)
• Lay out your site so that it is easy to understand and navigate and fill it with original, interesting content (Creating the Ambiance and the Menu)
• Get authoritative, local and topical sites to link to you (Promoting the Restaurant)

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