How to discover the best keywords for restaurants?

Simply put, AdWords works like this:

You set up some ads and associate them with keywords that are closely related to your business and the services that you offer. When someone searches for a particular search term that matches your keywords, the bidding starts. If that works well for you, your ad is shown. Then (hopefully) someone clicks on it, and your desired action (like an order) happens on the website.

And now let’s take a more practical example:

Let’s say you’re running an Italian restaurant and one of your keywords is “pizza”. When someone searches for “pizza”, you might think that you’re spot on with your restaurant ad. Well… not quite. In many cases, they might just want to find out more about a recipe, to seek for images, or maybe they just want to find out more about the history of pizza.

The point is that if you want to be effective with AdWords, you have to be specific with the keywords. You need to make sure that your ad is in accordance with what your client wants.

So in our example here, it’s not the best idea to bid on “pizza” to get orders, but rather on several long-tail keywords like:
“pizza delivery near me”.

Having this in mind, rest assured, we’ll help you uncover the best keywords for your restaurant.

One last thing: You might be tempted to say that you don’t mind the irrelevant impressions, as long as you pay for the clicks. Thing is that people click without carefully reading the ads. So you would eventually end up throwing money down the drain, paying for many irrelevant searches that won’t bring you a single order.

Moreover, there’s always Big Brother Google watching over your ads’ performance. When they are not meeting the users’ needs, the bidding becomes more expensive for you.

So be specific, be relevant. You’ll pay a lot less.

Let’s get started.

How to get your list of restaurant keywords

We promised it would be easy. So here’s how to do it:

1. Head over to our Free AdWords Campaign Generator
2. Start inserting your restaurant name. If it’s listed on Google Business, it will show up in the list and it will save you a form filling
3. Fill in the form and hit Generate Campaign
   There you have them, your keywords grouped by ad groups:
   Scroll down to the bottom of the page and insert your email address to get all these sent directly to your inbox.

Easy peasy!

Having that done, let’s now talk about what it’s there.

What are the best keywords for restaurants?

The keywords are about your business and the services that you do, which leads you to combinations of:

• Your restaurant name
• Your cuisines
• Your location
• The takeaway service
• The delivery service

To make our discussion easier to follow, let’s take another practical example.

Say we have a restaurant called Yummy Inn, in Whitchurch, UK that serves Chinese food. We want to run search ads with the goal to increase online sales for takeaway and delivery.

Brand keywords

Unless your restaurant is new, the brand keywords are the easiest to tackled (and also the cheapest ones).

Using our mockup example, here’s how the keywords would look like:

There’s always this debate of whether a business should do AdWords on brand keywords or not, the idea being that on brand keywords you rank high anyway (or event #1). Here are my 2 cents on the topic:

• You should totally do brand keywords if your website does not not rank #1.
• Check the click rate in the results page. And see:
  • Is your website getting most of the clicks? #1 in organic search is great, but not so helpful when you have the delivery portals advertising on your brand as well, filling in the search page and making you lose the real top spot.
  • Also, if your are paying double digit commission to the delivery portals to get new business, the orders that they are getting on your brand keywords are not new business at all. At the end of the day, it’s much cheaper for you to pay 50 cents/click for brand keywords than the commission to the delivery portals for your returning customers.
• If you are new with search ads, I would recommend starting only with brand keywords until you figure out how AdWords works.

Keywords on takeaway

Talking about the brand-related keywords was easy. Now we need to tackle those that would like to order food for takeaway, but don’t necessarily target your restaurant.

Here we have two groups. The first one is more specific (cuisine-oriented):

The second one is broader, so the conversion rate will decrease while the cost will go higher. No surprise, really. Someone looking for takeaway might not want to try your cuisine type.

There is an important point to make here: it’s very common for people to include in their searches the location.

But if you are in a big city, a keywords like Chinese takeaway New York doesn’t really makes sense. You cannot possibly cover the entire NYC, nor expect someone to drive 10 miles to pick up their takeaway.

So your area needs to be broken down in several keywords, like this:

Keywords on delivery

Here again two groups, with or without the cuisine.

Just like above, don’t forget to add a keyword for each area that you cover with delivery.

There are tons of small variations for these keywords, like:

And many more. So just make sure you set these keywords with broad match modifier, to make sure you catch all the variations. Like this:

And now the second group, less specific:

That’s about it!

Don’t forget about our Free AdWords Campaign Generator. Go get your complete list of keywords, specifically built for your restaurant, your cuisine and the services you offer. You can also use it to get step by step instructions on how to set up your AdWords Campaign, from start to finish.