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.
