I bet you’ve never thought about how your website is like a restaurant. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
 |
I’m a huge fan of “Kitchen Nightmares” on BBC with Chef Gordon Ramsay. It’s one of the few shows I save on my DVR because I like his bold style and his cutting advice (pardon the pun), that is, after I got past his foul language. Another SEO consultant blogged about how Chef Ramsay’s advice can be applied to website user experiences as well. That started me thinking. . .
In one show I watched recently, he rocketed in to an English pub that was serving fancy dishes with French sauces that the locals didn’t like. The pub’s restaurant traffic and revenues were so depressed he was about to lose his life savings and 30 years investment in being a restaurateur. Chef Ramsay changed the menu to typical pub food, and created a unique “social marketing” campaign for the pub around “Real Gravy”. They marched up and down the streets of the town with banners and tee-shirts handing out samples of Yorkshire pudding with real gravy to very delighted potential customers. Business and profits quadrupled from the word-of-mouth, in spite of a new competitor starting up right down the street.
I’ve condensed what I’ve learned from Chef Ramsay’s show into these three rules of good service. I’d love to hear what you think about it:
1. Create the perfect “menu”–offer fresh, high-quality dishes that the locals and visitors are looking for. (This is your fresh article content and blog posts.)
2. Attract “guests” to enjoy it!–go out to the places where people are hanging out and let them sample your goods, see others liking your offerings, and get comfortable with you. (This is social media, news releases, and other online and offline marketing and promotions)
3. Mind the “numbers”–keep your eye on the daily visitors, time they’re spending at your site, how much they’re buying, how much it’s costing you, and how often they return. (This is making good use of web analytics and business analysis.)
You can use these rules to make your website more profitable, too.
Find out more about how to do this at my free webinar:
“SEO for Business Results—Wake Up From a Kitchen Nightmare”
Borrowing a theme from Chef Gordon Ramsay’s TV show, Kitchen Nightmares, see how your website is a lot like a restaurant. In this free LinkShare webinar I’m hosting, you’ll take away quick pointers on how to turn your website into an attractive, profitable, and visitor-friendly place that guests want to return to frequently. You’ll also get the recipe for “SEO Secret Sauce for 2010”.
Here’s the link to the webinar recording.
You might enjoy this fun clip of Chef Ramsay,” The Screaming Chef”, with David Letterman:
Bon appétit!
{ 2 comments }
Hi Sally, Just saw your post link from trackback, very interesting.
I agree with your “three rules of good service” and I think quality and promotion are the most important things.
Quality doesn’t mean to be complicated, sometimes it can be as simple as cooking meat ball (in one episode, Chef Ramsay told struggled restaurant to cook meat ball and people love it). Promotion is also critical because otherwise who is gonna know what you are cooking
Thanks for your note, Frank! Appreciate your creative post that started me thinking about the topic!I agree about keeping it simple and promotion. Here’s the link the to webinar archive if you’re interested so you can hear what I had to say about that.
http://bit.ly/adUnom
I’ll post an update blog post soon as well with more information.