menukarma blog

The significance of a restaurant’s name is greatly amplified on the web. Your name is how your customers and constituents will come looking for you on the search engines. The words and letters in your restaurant’s name determine how easy or difficult it will be for you to corner your own search traffic. I took a look at the names of two restaurants recently opened in the Village in New York City, and assessed each one for “Search Engine Friendliness”

“BarFry” = Good.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote an intelligent piece last month about restaurant names, titled The Art of Nomenclature. Most of the article is devoted to celebrating the name BarFry, a recently opened tempura joint in New York City. We are agreed, BarFry is indeed a great restaurant name. Why? Because (to quote Jarvis Dennison): “The name is brilliant. Short, memorable and absolutely unconfusable with anything else.”

But, beyond the name’s appeal to humans, I am also struck what a good choice it is for the search engines. On this point, Frank had a doubt:

“I wonder, though, how strategically prudent that name is. People looking for restaurant addresses and restaurant phone numbers on Google and other search engines are better served by a name like Sripraphai than by a name like Hearth or the House,..”

The problem with “hearth” and “the house” is not just that they are comprised of common words. Their problem is that the entire name of the restaurant, as a pattern of letters, is to be found on millions of web pages. In other words, they are common strings. But, “barfry”, although “bar” and “fry” are ultra-common, is really quite unique. And unlike “Sripraphai“, I think that most people who only hear the name “BarFry” will correctly guess how to spell it. And given that, when they come to look for you on the web, they’ll find you here, and (hopefully) here.

“The Smith” = Bad.

The Smith, a more recent entry to the NYC Village restaurant scene, is an example of what not to name your restaurant. Talk about a horrible choice! Not only is “the smith” an extraordinarily common string in the English language, it is also (to judge from the page 1 results on Google), the name of an important Opera House in Upstate New York, a rather aspirational looking high-rise apartment building in Brooklyn, and of course is eight ninths of The Smiths!

I want to stop short of suggesting anything like a formula for search-engine-smart restaurant names. I’d hate to limit anyone’s imagination. But if what you want is to drive people looking for your restaurant to a web site you control, here’s some thoughtful advice…

If you have a clean slate, strongly consider just making up a word, if you feel up to it. This is the best way to be assured of having a unique string of letters. For a total coup, pick up the domain name as well! This is your best chance to capture all your own web traffic.

If you have a restaurant with a sort of common name, and you want to try to capture as much traffic as you deserve, you can do a lot with the right domain name. When looking for a domain name variant, because for example the name of your place is “The Rose”, and therose.com is of course taken, don’t automatically reach for theroserestaurant.com or therosenyc.com. While those names are closer to the search queries people will type when they try to find you, they are not very unusual. By that I mean, there are probably lots of “rose restaurants” in the world, and probably lots of “roses” in New York. So, it would probably still take some work to bring you up into the upper listings. My suggestion is to look for additional descriptive terms you can tack on to your restaurant’s name that might form a unique string or a unique but memorable sequence of words. For example, if your restaurant, The Rose, were located on 99th street, you might leap at rose99.com or therose99.com. What may happen there is you will observe that people will begin to refer to the establishment by its domain name (rather than by the name on the door), but there’s nothing wrong with that. You have given your constituents the means to find you on the web. And that is something that even the largest brands in the world are bending, stretching and disguising themselves to achieve.

Postres nicas were sought on Altavista today and found at Oye, Managua. This one is a bit of a head-scratcher. The query translates to roughly “Nicaraguan Desserts”. Since “nicas” is the insider term for Nicaraguan, or from Nicaragua, I got to wondering where the searcher was located, geographically. As it turns out (according to their IP address), this person is a Comcast subscriber somewhere in Dade County, Florida. Interesting. Not much hope this person will be able to gratify his or her impulse for Nicaraguan sweets tonight, at least not from the Oye Managua restaurant, located 3,100 miles away in San Francisco. Hmmmm. I’ll bet there’s a whole universe of ethnic food keywords just sitting there, waiting for the right offer of gratification to monetize their traffic.

I live in San Francisco, where there is what I would describe as a shitload of Thai restaurants. menukarma has about 150 listings for Thai Restaurant in San Francisco, (map view) but the total number is much bigger. Google local search puts the figure at over a thousand, which feels a lot closer to the truth to me. In some parts of town, there are 2 or 3 on a block for blocks. I’m not a huge fan of Thai, truth be told, so it feels like too many fucking Thai restaurants to me. But, it is hard to argue with their collective success. I wonder if that large number of restaurants reflects the innate demand of the city to consume Thai food. I reckon not. I reckon it’s a combination of factors, not the least of which is the high economic efficiency of many Thai restaurants. If they are the only kind of restaurant surviving in a certain type of available San Francisco retail space, then their success is not the expression of demand, but of something else.

Somebody smart once said that the best arguments are made by stating the obvious. On this blog, I don’t so much want to make arguments as be suggestive. So I am just going to make some obvious statements in suggestive ways, and leave it at that.

The first statement is “The restaurant business has changed.” That’s a big one, and its as obvious as the nose on Gerard Depardieu’s face. On this blog, I’m going to specifically consider how the advent of the Internet has touched the restaurant business. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty among restaurant operators as to the ways their businesses are affected by the Web. I want to try to answer some of those questions from the perspective of someone who trafficks in their menus and names.

The second statement is “America has a terrible diet.” That one is about as obvious as the disconcerting feeling of looseness under your chin. You may think you know who the culprits are, and mostly you’re right. But what you may not know is how the power of Fast Food is being leveraged on the web, in ways that make it a “GAME OVER” for the small, local restaurant before it’s even begun. I want to shed some light on the mechanics of “local web search”, and how national advertising budgets are shaping the web side of the restaurant business.

The third obvious statement is “Location, location, location.” While the location of a restaurant still has the greatest influence on its prospects as a business, the advent of the Web and of certain kinds of web sites, has radically transformed the ways people find and choose the places they eat. On this blog, I’m going to look at how Social Networking on the web touches restaurants. I’m also going to expose the distribution and concentrations of certain types of restaurants in certain cities, to draw conclusions about demand patterns. I’m thinking that my search engine referrer logs can tell me something about what people are looking for and where. That information, combined with information about where restaurants are located could identify opportunities for certain kinds of food in certain places.

I’m not advocating that a restaurant must have a web site. Certainly, it is one of menukarma’s most important aims to provide good, basic information on behalf of restaurants who do not have their own sites. There are some of you, however, who don’t have web sites, but really should – simply because it’s cheaper and easier than you think. And there’s also a lot of room for your creative talent on the web. In another article, I chided noob restaurateurs for over-indulging their creativity, and putting too much passion in their concepts and menus, at the expense of business sense. Here’s an opportunity to channel that irrepressible individuality into a positive. Quirky designs that flout conventional web design principles are in. Eschew the gloss. The public will readily forgive a new restaurant for not having the flashiest site on the web, especially if it’s clever and doesn’t take itself too seriously. A simple web site might even be a complement to your brand, say for example if your values as a restaurant include giving people a lot for their money.

Here’s a simple, little 1-page web site that I admire. For what it is, it couldn’t be any better than it is. It gives you an exterior picture, an interior picture, a few sentences “about us” and a selection of specialties from the house. I especially like this last item, in lieu of a full menu — since it conveys something about what the kitchen believes it does well, without committing the chef to anything too specific. The page also has some nice meta-tags. Check out the HTML source code. Good job, Auberge la Cabirotade!