Pictures can help your restaurant stand out in a competitive industry — here’s how
A picture is worth a thousand words. And when it comes to promoting and upgrading restaurant marketing they can be extremely powerful tools. So how can photos help your restaurant to stand out in a competitive industry?
Would Mcdonald’s become such a globally distributed company if pictures of food it advertised with looked like one on the right? Thousands of customers it attracts with images of mouthwatering burgers that awake a craving in us, like the one on the left image below, tell a different story.
There are several different ways to market a restaurant — advertising, social media, word of mouth, direct marketing.. But the one that often seems to be overlooked is using photos as a tool to advertise a business. High-quality photos can help the restaurant to appear more appealing and attractive to potential visitors.
Pictures are here to tell a story. They make people feel — awake emotions, and memories, and inspire us in the split second it takes our brain to process it. A carefully chosen and placed image can be a deal breaker for any web page and its importance only increases when we are talking about images of mouth-watering food. Visitors to our website or social media profile will first notice a picture and then decide if it is relevant for them in just a split second.
Images we post of our food should awaken the appetite of a customer at a first glance and trigger visual hunger. So high-quality photos taken from a just right angle can only help any goals we have set for restaurants' online platforms.
As the restaurant industry becomes increasingly competitive, it is important to stand out from the crowd and attract new customers. One way to do this is through marketing. Marketing helps to create awareness of your restaurant and can make potential customers more likely to try it out. High-quality photos can help you create attention, raise brand awareness, improve search engine optimization (SEO) and boost sales.
Using photos is necessary for any field today, but the whole tourism industry certainly puts a special focus on the quality of the images, so having an amazing picture is not enough anymore. Today restaurants have to make sure that the pictures help their establishment to stand out. Using photos is a great way to show off any special features or amenities that the restaurant has to offer. It can be a way to show off a unique selling point or something that makes your restaurant stand out from the competition. For example, by using beautiful photos of your food and restaurant interior, you can give potential customers a taste of what they can expect when they visit you in person.
What kind of restaurant we are talking about?
Type of restaurant should also play a role in planning of the photoshoots. If you have a little local bistro that focuses on local customers and delivery platforms you should focus on the food and the options your restaurant has like shown in the image below.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about a Michelin-star restaurant where the focus is on the whole dining experience as well as food, the image that we use to market the restaurant should capture the whole experience as we can see below.
Images Help Create a Good First Impression
When people are looking for a new restaurant to try, they often do some research online before making a decision. This includes reading reviews, looking at menus, and checking out photos.
If your restaurant’s website doesn’t have any photos, potential customers might get the impression that you’re not serious about your business or that you don’t have anything worth showing off. Also, if your website offers low-quality photos of only a few options on your menu it can seem unprofessional, messy, and most definitely not a place where you want to eat your next meal.
On the other hand, if your website includes high-quality photos of your food, décor, and staff, potential customers are more likely to get a positive first impression of your business and be interested in trying it out.
How Images Help With Your Restaurant SEO
Crucial part od of any marketing strategy is making sure your website is optimised for search engines. That is why an important part of advertising a restaurant is to make sure it shows in results when people search for a local place to eat or a specific dish that is your specialty. We want to ensure that your restaurant shows up among first results on search engine results page (SERP) and attracts customers. To do that you need to make sure you’re using images effectively. Images can help search engines understand your restaurant’s web page and the offer of your establishment while also helping to create a good first impression for potential customers.
Here are some tips on how to use images to improve your restaurant’s SEO:
Search engines like Google use algorithms to determine what results to show for a given search query. A huge part of these algorithms is understanding the content of websites and pages. This is where images come in. By including images on your website and optimizing them, you’re helping search engines understand your restaurant and what it has to offer to potential customers.
Pictures Help Customers Find Your Restaurant
In addition to helping search engines understand your restaurant, images can also help customers find your restaurant when they’re searching online. For example, if someone is searching for “pizza in Zagreb,” Google will show relevant results that include images along with the text results.
If your restaurant’s website includes good-quality photos of pizza, there’s a good chance that Google will show your result to the searcher before the ones that don’t have any photos.
Search engines are looking for images that are relevant to the topic at hand, so it’s important to optimize your images before you upload them to your website. There are a few ways to do this:
Use Relevant Images
In addition to using optimized images, it’s also important to use images that are relevant to your restaurant. That means using pictures of your food, staff, and dining area on your website and social media accounts. Customers want to see what they’re getting themselves into before they visit your restaurant, so make sure the images you’re using give them a good idea of what to expect, and that they don’t oversell or undersell your product.
Use Alt Text
Another way to optimize your images for SEO is by using alt text. This is the text that appears in place of an image if it can’t be displayed for some reason. It’s also what shows up when someone goes over an image on a website or when an image is being loaded slowly. Alt text should be brief but descriptive, and it should include keywords that are relevant to your restaurant.
Increase Your Restaurant’s Visibility on Social Media
Social media is another great way to increase your restaurant’s visibility with images. When you post photos of your food on social media, be sure to include relevant keywords in the caption so that people can find your restaurant when they’re searching for those keywords. You can also use hashtags to make your photos more visible. Hashtags are used to categorize content on social media. When you use relevant hashtags, your photos will be more likely to show up in search results on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook.
Increase Your Restaurant’s Visibility on Review Sites
Review sites like TripAdvisor and Google Places are another great way to increase your restaurant’s visibility with images. When customers leave reviews of your restaurant, they often include photos along with their reviews. These photos can help new customers get an idea of what your restaurant looks like and what kind of food you serve, while also giving them a peek at the experience people usually have at the place.
Importance of review photos
You can spend hundreds of dollars on special photographers that are going to take a picture of the food and drinks you offer. Times have changed and restaurant owners and marketers don’t have full control anymore. You can post all the best photos of food imaginable but if your place doesn’t have a certain aesthetic and is not pleasing for people to take pictures you might have a problem. You have to make sure your customers are satisfied when they leave the restaurant because one bad review including a picture of the customer’s experience can ruin all your efforts.
Conclusion
Your restaurant photography is important for many reasons. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that it tells potential customers what your food looks like. Before customers decide to dine with you, they search your menus and website for images of your dishes. Photos also help your customers to differentiate your restaurant from the sea of others. They help it with raising awareness via social media, SEO improvement and attracting new customers. In short, pictures of food are here to stay and their importance in the restaurant industry will only increase with time.
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