“Never Said About Restaurant Websites” - Too True

by: iCopywriter Senior Editor, Heather Price-Wright

If hilarious Tumblrs and Web inside jokes are your idea of fun, you must check out the low-key but completely hysterical new blog “Never Said About Restaurant Websites.”

A few gems:

“I hope the phone number and address are actually images so I can’t copy and paste them!”

—No persons

“I like when the music blasts as soon as the site loads. It signals to everyone at work that I am going out to eat!”

—No one I know.

“I go to restaurant websites for the ambiance.”

—Anyone?

Of course, as Slate.com’s Farhad Manjoo pointed out back in August in his very funny article, “Overdone: Why are Restaurant Websites So Horrifically Bad?” the blog brings up a very real problem. While many other small businesses have managed to use their online presence to their advantage, with sharply designed sites, high-quality content and plenty of useful information for potential customers, too many restaurants still seem to be behind the curve.

Features like music that plays automatically, complicated flash animation, “welcome” pages that have to be manually “skipped,” menus that take forever to load as separate PDFs, while they may feel so early 2000s, seem to be mainstays of even the finest restaurants’ websites. And for the life of us, we can’t figure out why that is.

After all, most customers head to a site, especially that of a restaurant, for the most basic information:

·      What are the hours?

·      Where is it located?

·      Can I make a reservation?

·      What’s on the menu?

And yet it seems we have to wade through multiple verses of whatever odd love song the restaurant’s (presumably in-house) website designer thought conveyed the “mood” of the place before we can track down a menu, and even then, breakfast, lunch, dinner & drinks all have to load separately…As PDFs.

What gives?

We’ve got some advice for restaurant owners out there: Leave the website flourishes behind, and instead, invest some time in a clean, well-designed site, with clean, well-written content. Present the relevant information in a prominent place that’s easy for patrons to find, and maybe even consider allowing customers to do things like book reservations online. These days, simplicity and high-quality content, not bells and whistles, rule the Web.

And please, oh please, don’t make us listen to “That’s Amore” again! 

Shoot us a note if you want the names of some fab site designers we heart.

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Bing Announces Biggest Search Queries of 2011

by: iCopywriter Senior Blogger, Gaia Veenis

Bing was the first of the search engines to release statistics about its most popular Internet queries so far in 2011. Microsoft’s search engine released its “top queries of 2011” list the Monday after Thanksgiving.

What does this mean for online marketers and Internet retailers? Basically, the list provides useful information to help such businesses decide which key terms to focus on and what trends to follow in order to maximize traffic and sales during the holiday shopping rush.

Search Term Categories 

Not all of the search terms that Bing reported are useful to all retailers (or any retailers at all), but many of them are quite relevant. Luckily, companies can easily find the search query data that is most relevant or interesting to them, because Bing has categorized the most popular search terms of 2011 by topic. Whether you’re keeping track of the latest movements in pop culture or trying to maximize your profits by monitoring industry-related search trends, you should be able to find the stats you’re looking for. These are some examples of search query categories you might want to follow:  

Consumer trends

Electronics and popular products

Celebrities

Travel destinations

Film and music releases

News stories

Industry/technology

Health and fitness

What This Means for Retailers and Online Marketers

A lot of the information from Bing’s latest list of most-searched terms may seem irrelevant to the average consumer, but could be very meaningful for businesses. For example, while most individuals won’t benefit much from learning that Justin Bieber is a top Bing search term in categories including celebrity, musician and person, surprisingly enough, this information may be relevant to a great number of retailers. Music sites are constantly looking for this kind of information. It could also benefit e-commerce sites targeting important demographics like pre-teen and teenage girls; knowing that Bieber was a hot search term in 2011 could, for example, help retailers decide whether to carry the pop star's line of nail polish.

Other information from Bing’s list is more obviously relevant to businesses. “Selling a home” was a top search in the real estate category, for example, while “The Cholesterol Diet” was a top search in the health and fitness category. And in the closely-watched consumer electronics category, searches for products including iPads, Kindles, Playstations and Xboxes gave retailers and manufacturers some interesting insights.

The publication of this list before the end of November also means that businesses and marketers have some more useful information to look forward to, as Google and other search engines are sure to release similar lists very soon.

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Google & Bing Gear Up for the Holidays

by: iCopywriter Senior Blogger, Gaia Veenis

Search engine companies, just like any other product or service provider, tend to put some extra effort toward advertising and branding during the holidays. This year, Bing will release a holiday ad campaign that the search engine hopes will help it catch up with the competition. Google is the online search king, capturing a whopping two thirds of the market, but Microsoft’s newly designed search engine, Bing, is making every effort to chip away at that lion’s share. While other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask.com, aren’t putting much effort toward luring users away from Google, Bing is really pulling out all the stops this holiday season.

Bing Makes an Expensive Advertising Move  

If you recall the classic animated version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which has been airing on network television every holiday season since 1964, then you should be familiar with Microsoft’s new ad campaign for Bing. Rudolph and the rest of the gang from the original TV special will star in the ads, an expensive move on Microsoft’s part, considering the typical cost of licensing rights. The team at Microsoft had to convince the family that owns the rights to these 47-year-old characters that Bing would add an appealing new chapter to the classic story of Rudolph, as depicted in the original special. The holiday advertisements will be airing on television and online.   

Google Stands Its Advertising Ground

There’s little chance that Google will be giving up too much of its market share any time soon, even if Bing’s nostalgic advertising campaign shakes things up a bit. Google's powerful ads air year-round, showing the search engine at work, then simply flashing the Google Chrome logo. Unlike Microsoft, Google doesn’t have much experience with TV ads and other forms of traditional advertising. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page purposefully avoided such marketing campaigns until the 2010 Super Bowl, when the company begrudgingly entered the television commercial market under CEO Eric Schmidt. But having spent nearly $6 million more on advertising so far this year than last year, it seems that Google has quickly fallen in love with advertising.    

So the question remains – will Rudolph win? According to the beloved children’s tale, Rudolph was a reindeer who made miracles happen. Bing could use a miracle to capture some of the market share from Google, but it’s still unclear how much the Rudolph-themed ads will help.

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November Brings Big News from Google+

by: iCopywriter Senior Blogger, Gaia Veenis

November brought some big changes in the online marketing world, just in time for the end-of-year rush. All the buzz is leaving some people wondering what kinds of major shifts are yet to come in 2012, but that speculation will just have to wait. Right now, the news is all about Google+.

The search engine giant’s answer to social media introduced Google+ Pages in November, and gained a 5% boost in traffic for the week ending November 12, compared to the previous week. This represented a whopping 25% growth over the same week the previous month. Although Google+’s growth was originally moderate, the introduction of Pages was responsible for a huge push of traffic in the week of and week after its introduction. Since the social media platform was introduced in June, the launch week of Google+ Pages has been Google+'s third biggest week for traffic. The top two weeks for traffic followed the removal of an invite-only policy that originally kept many people from being able to join. 

Other changes to Google+ may have some significance for online marketers who have avoided spending much time, energy and/or money on the site. When it was introduced, Google+ had a fairly minimal amount of content, but now that third-party social applications, including Buddy Media, HootSuite and Involver, are available for businesses and organizations to integrate into the site, the possibilities have expanded. These applications allow users to post to Google+ as well as sites like Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. The initial difficulties with updating posts and viewing others' profiles seem to have been eliminated for businesses and organizations, as well. 

It will be interesting to see what happens with Google+ in the New Year, but for now, it seems the king of search engines is making the right kinds of changes to make this a more viable social media marketing tool. 

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